Friday, January 17, 2014

The Lync and UC Market in 2013

While most of us use January to look forward to what’s coming in the next year and getting up to speed with the challenges, I find it often useful to take a look back at what happened last year. To that end, Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research as set out an interesting look at 2013, in an article entitled ‘The UC Market Year in Review’ which was carried by the NoJitter site.

Lazar focused on four primary technologies that stood out on 2013: Cloud, Lync, UC Mobility and Video. The cloud continues to receive a huge amount of attention from a variety of vendors not least Microsoft. Lazar believes that the Cloud will only grow more important over the coming year.

As for Lync, Lazar notes that Microsoft is making inroads into the IP Telephony market, with 13% market share, which Avaya is tied at 13%, but Cisco continues to lead with 32% market share.  Lazar predicts that Microsoft will continue to make waves and will aggressively target it’s competition, although at present Lazar claims Lync is significantly more expensive to operate than some of the competition – something no doubt that Microsoft will address in the next version of Lync.

Mobility is also a feature that was being adopted widely during 2013, a trend that Lazar predicts will grow significantly in 2014. Lazar expects that percentage of employees using tablets as their primary work device to climb to over 20% in 2014. Video too is likely to go ballistic as it becomes ever easier to record video which translates to a demand for Enterprise style YouTube capabilities.

An interesting paper, and certainly it ties in with the kinds of questions and issues I’m seeing in the forums and in my courses. And if you take the time to read his article, make sure you look at the comments – some interesting observations there!

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