Infonetics Report: VoIP and UC to Reach $88 billion by 2018

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

Infonetics Research (News - Alert), a market research firm, released its VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report this month. In the report, the group noted that VoIP services revenue will reach $88 billion by 2018 with growth in the industry occurring worldwide.

The yearly report covers information related to the revenue and subscription numbers concerning both voice over IP (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) providers, discussing the impact growth and loss in the industries will have on the overall market. Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics, discussed, in a related company research brief, the nature of the growth her company found.

“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide. Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up market as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market,” Myers said.

Infonetics' predominant forecast about the VoIP market is that the industry will generate overall revenue of $88 billion by 2018, but its report suggested other positive growth numbers associated with communications services. From 2012 to 2013 the global business and residential VoIP services market grew eight percent to $68 billion. In the same period, the SIP trunking market grew 50 percent, and sales of private branch exchange (PBX (News - Alert)) and UC services increased 13 percent.

Unlike the reality of some comparable industries, business size does not appear to affect the growth potential of the VoIP market. Myers commented previously that businesses of all sizes can take advantage of VoIP and PBX technologies because cloud computing places all firms on an equal playing field. Because third parties host services remotely, anyone can take advantage of them.

That means that VoIP is poised to continue growing for an indefinite period. As long as every business has access to the market, they will continue to access it according to needs. Considering that communications services are a need of every firm, whether large or small, there is no reason to doubt that VoIP will carry that need into the foreseeable future.

Edited by Maurice Nagle