Recent studies suggest that the UC market will explode over the next five years, blossoming into a $30 billion market by 2013. The article says:

“In the premises-based UC solutions market, we expect to see declining revenues for PBXs, audio bridges, and unified messaging solutions; however, these will be offset by increasing revenues in presence/IM servers, Web conferencing servers, team workspaces, and video endpoints and infrastructure,” said Brent Kelly, Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research. “In addition, we are seeing significant interest and now some large deployments in the UC services market, and we expect managed/hosted UC services to grow tremendously.”

But, when you combine the component markets that make up unified communications and look at the unified communications market as a whole, it appears that what was a $21.5 billion market in 2008 is on track for 12% annual growth and is predicted to grow to a $37.3 billion market by 2013. With a global economy in recession its nice to see an IT segment with strong growth. It is probably no coincidence that it is a market segment that has the most potential to result in more efficient and streamlined business processes and enable organizations to cut costs in a variety of ways.