North American Hosted IP Telephony and UC Services Markets

As hosted telephony and UC services become more widely available and technologies mature in North America, market awareness and customer comfort levels are bound to increase. The market is expected to evolve into two distinct segments: plain-vanilla voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services targeted at the most cost-conscious, very small businesses; and advanced hosted/ cloud UC solutions targeted at the more demanding, larger, organizations. By 2017, the user base is likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 32.7 percent and by the end of the decade, hosted users are likely to account for about 20 percent of all business telephony users in North America. The hype around cloud technologies has contributed to growing customer interest in hosted solutions and software as a service (SaaS). Small and medium businesses (SMBs) account for the majority of early adopters, but larger businesses are increasingly deploying hosted services at branches and remote locations, with some intending to eventually migrate the entire organization.  (Frost & Sullivan)