The Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) market for unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is expected to surge to $659 million in 2018 at a five-year growth of 89%.
Research firm IDC also said service providers are intensifying their sales and marketing campaign around this service.
IDC said Australia will be the largest market, followed by China, India, and Korea.
There has been an enormous interest from a wide range of businesses in adopting UCaaS because of the imminent cost benefits, flexibility and agility that the technology provides, IDC said.
In fact, UCaaS has become a mainstream solution in APAC with many global service providers and regional service providers, offering full-fledged UCaaS as part of their core collaboration portfolio.
Aside from the big telcos, which controls a significant portion of the market, there are also large system integrators, IT consulting firms and distributors offering UCaaS directly to businesses, IDC added.
The growing attraction of an agile and opex-friendly collaboration tool model to support business expansion will continue to be compelling to many organizations.
On the other hand, many of the factors holding back adoption such as security, bandwidth demands, reliability, regulation compliance and consistency will be partially solved as the technology matures and bandwidth cost drops.
IDC also said there will be very strong interest in UCaaS solutions among mid-large enterprises, as well as small businesses. In particular, IDC has observed strong adoption interest in Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore.
This article originally appeared on ComputerWorld Hong Kong website
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