-Unified Communications as a Service (UC), MDM, Social Collaboration and Big Data will be big themes in 2013-

SYDNEY, Dec 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The enterprise communications market in Australia is set to develop further in 2013. The prominence and rapid growth of the mobile enterprise will see communications centred heavily around mobility.

At Frost & Sullivan's ICT outlook briefing 2013 held in Sydney today, Audrey William, Head of Research, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan ANZ, said "The Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS) market for ANZ is expected to rapidly expand to US$1.1 Billion by 2018." The market is expected to see a plethora of vendors, systems integrators and carriers offer UC as a Service in 2013. Frost & Sullivan predicts some non-traditional players and new integrators to enter this space moving forward.

The communications and collaboration space will also see rising competition from OTT (Over the Top) players. As the use of over-the-top and social media applications become more applicable to the corporate setting, companies will increasingly have to incorporate these applications to develop better productivity in the working place and foster innovation. "Making calls from social media platforms such as Facebook will be common in the future. OTT applications such as Skype, WhatsApp and Viber allow users to communicate for free over the internet, reducing the costs of communication services," says William. There will be more OTT players in the marketplace offering voice and videoconferencing services in 2013 and beyond in the marketplace.

"BYOD (Bring your own device) will be a common theme but the situation will be more complex than that in the market. Managing the device will just be one aspect of the puzzle. Managing applications used such a DropBox and other cloud applications will add another layer of complexity for IT managers and CIOs. As such EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management) Solutions centred around MDM (Mobile Device Management), Security, Telecom Expense Management, Application Management will rise in importance in 2013. This will be a crowded space in 2013 with the telecom carriers, specialist MDM vendors, Unified Communication vendors and systems integrators vying the large opportunities ahead in this space" said William.

William observes, "The contact centre market is also witnessing a shift in how customer service will be delivered. We can expect more cloud based contact centre vendors in the market in 2013. Additionally many contact centres are looking to enhance customer service by delivering a superior mobile experience; It is linking the experience from the mobile application and integrating that to the contact centre that will drive a new of experience". The cloud model also provides contact centres with disaster recovery and business continuity features which are critical given some of the recent events such as floods and bushfires in Australia.

With the rise in mobility, cloud solutions and social collaboration applications, big data will grow in importance in the enterprise communications and collaboration space. Combining structured and unstructured data will drive huge opportunities for vendors in the market. "We are only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to big data and the amount of information this will provide an organisation in terms how all these pockets of data co-relate to each other will drive endless possibilities for organisations" stated William.

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