South African Unified Communications Market Report: Unified Communications to

As the South African unified communications market remains at an early growth stage, it presents profitable opportunities for telecommunications service providers in the country. These opportunities include offering individual UC elements/applications as then as fully integrated UC solutions. Now, the challenge for vendors and system integrators is to demonstrate to clients the benefits of UC and its return on investment, as there is a lack of industry standards on its applications and solutions also as successful case studies. Hosted UC solutions and cloud computing will help in overcoming the bottleneck of service adoption as they minimise the capital expenditure on UC infrastructure and IT spend.

The adoption of UC

Outsourced contact centre services are driving the adoption of UC, notes the analyst of this technology. The demand for hosted UC applications will attract SMEs and SOHO users. Outsourced contact centres are major areas for UC applications. They are focus areas for improving the quality of customer support services, which are increasingly considered as a key value-added service for telecommunications service providers. Together, hosted UC solutions are poised to drive market growth as SME and SOHO clients boost their spending on UC solutions in the nearly future.

The lack of skilled labour looms as a major challenge to market development. The requirement of intensive on-the-job training is considered a major bottleneck for UC market growth, as the implementation and maintenance of UC systems require high levels of ICT expertise. Legacy customer premise equipment as well threatens market prospects by restraining system integration. Legacy infrastructure on clients premises prevents businesses from deploying and integrating advanced and cost-effective UC applications, explains the analyst. This is due to the fact that some organisations will not benefit from improved voice and data communications as these businesses are small in scale.