Report: UC spending to go from millions to billions in 5 years

According to a new ABI Research report on Unified Communications, uptake is on a 'steeply rising curve.' ABI's report reveals that spending on the combination of IP telephony, instant messaging and video collaboration is expected to rise significantly over the next five years.

In the new study, ABI expects UC spending to rise from the lowly sum of $302 million in 2008 to $4.2 billion by 2013. The report claimed, however, that the next five years will involve lots of growing pains for the industry as businesses battle internally to show how the benefits of UC technologies outweigh the costs of their upgrades. Currently companies are putting UC systems together in a piecemeal fashion--only picking ones where they see the most immediate ROI, but ABI claims that those that do start combining the communications technologies into a fully realized UC solution begin to realize the synergies that result in more efficiencies and cost savings.

For more:
- read this article from BusinessWeek

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