Canalys enhances unified communications coverage

Canalys today announced the launch of its Unified Communications Analysis continuous information service. This exciting new service builds on its successful predecessor – Converged Telephony Analysis – and is led by analyst Matthew Ball. It provides marketing executives with the information they need to monitor and understand trends in unified communications and how vendors successfully sell solutions through the channel to end users.

“The enterprise telephony market is continuously evolving thanks to the emergence of new technologies, vendors and channels,” said Ball. “Our original Converged Telephony Analysis service was designed to track convergence of voice and data. Over the last five years, we have seen the rate of converged voice and data network deployment increase significantly, especially in medium-sized and large businesses. These businesses will want to build on their investments and start looking at the way employees communicate within teams, and with customers and suppliers, to make them more efficient and productive. Telephony will be increasingly integrated with user presence and identification, as well as other modes of communication, including e-mail, IM, video and web conferencing, all of which are accessible through a multitude of software clients, business applications and end-user devices.”

“The rising popularity of collaborative social networking sites, such as MySpace, video content sites, including YouTube, and IM and VoIP clients from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Skype, shows how the way people interact with one another in their personal lives is changing,” Ball added. “And we will see more and more employees having expectations of similar rich media collaborative applications, offered by unified communications solutions, for day-to-day working.”

Ball continued, “Over the last five years, convergence of voice and data has encouraged new vendors, such as Cisco, 3Com and Swyx, to emerge and become established in telephony. Cisco has been particularly successful, leveraging its dominant position in enterprise networking to become a top five global player. The evolution to unified communications means we will see more software vendors entering deeper into the telephony market, for example Microsoft and IBM. This will pose significant challenges for existing telephony vendors, and they will have to respond.”

Unified Communications Analysis will build on the highly regarded Canalys Converged Telephony Analysis service. Clients will receive quarterly market share information for enterprise telephony CPE by vendor, and analysis of routes to market and technologies. Each quarter, clients will also receive the results of an online enterprise infrastructure channel survey that gauges channel opinion on key issues. The continuous service also delivers five-year forecasts, a Canalys Point of View report on the key market players and regular updates of information on contact centres, messaging, conferencing, hosted telephony, video telephony and hardware and software end-user device shipments. Supporting information on resellers, service providers and systems integrators is also provided. Advice and analysis of market trends is delivered through issue-led reports, covering topics such as the impact of open source telephony, insight into the leading vendors’ channel strategies and analysis of how service providers are evolving. In addition, clients gain access to the new Canalys Enterprise Pulse bulletins, which provide fast, concise analysis of major industry events.

Two service variants are available. The EMEA service covers 26 countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The Worldwide service adds the Asia Pacific region, Latin America and North America to the EMEA information. The Unified Communications Analysis service is complemented by other services in Canalys’ growing portfolio, including Enterprise Networking Analysis, Enterprise Security Analysis, Channels Analysis, Smart Mobile Device Analysis and Mobile Messaging Analysis.

About Canalys

Canalys specialises in delivering high quality market data, analysis and advice to the world’s leading technology vendors. It is recognised as a key provider of continuous advisory services and confidential custom projects for marketing managers and strategists within blue-chip IT, telecoms, navigation and consumer electronics companies. It has unrivalled expertise in European routes to market for all kinds of high technology products and services in the consumer, SMB and large enterprise segments, and provides worldwide market data and trends analysis.

Receiving updates

To receive future Canalys press releases directly, please e-mail a request with your details to press@canalys.com or complete this form specifying the technology market topics in which you are most interested.