Asia-Pacific's hosted IP telephony and and unified communications and collaboration (UCC) services market has entered the high-growth zone, according to Frost & Sullivan.
Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have emerged as the largest markets for hosted IPT and UCC services, while India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam are exhibiting strong growth potential for IPT adoption due to the increasing influx of service providers.
Governments of these countries are de-regulating the operational rights for VoIP and SIP trunking to catalyze their adoption, which, in turn, will drive hosted PBX adoption. Foreign competitors are building partnerships with local telecom companies to penetrate and gradually expand their footprint in these markets.
“The customer demand for robust, integrated enterprise communications solutions has inspired telecoms and Internet service providers to offer a hosting or reselling model,” Frost & Sullivan digital transformation research analyst Chong Zi Ning said.
“Service reliability and flexibility are the key considerations for customers to migrate to a hosted model. Enterprises with more than 200 IP phone users are prospective customers.”
But Frost & Sullivan’s research also finds that despite the immense growth potential, a large installed base of legacy ICT infrastructure is restraining the swift adoption of hosted IPT and UCC services in the Asia-Pacific region.
Moreover, factors such as privacy concerns, the absence of well-structured legal regulations against malicious breaches, evolving directives about cloud computing, and difficulties associated with data accessibility often discourage customers from shifting from their existing system.
Many industry challenges will be resolved once governments start implementing e-governance programs, which will increase their communications spending. In addition, there needs to be well-defined plans to refurbish the existing network infrastructure so that uninterrupted, real-time communication via public network becomes possible.
“Many organizations in the Asia-Pacific region have yet to migrate to hosted telephony solutions from on-premise telephony solutions, which will be a key driver for growth in the market,” noted Chong.
“The Asian macro-economy is expected to grow at a faster rate than any other continents’ during the forecast period. In addition, no significant financial meltdown is anticipated in the short term,” she explained.