The global market for business and residential VoIP services grew 8% in 2013 year-over-year to reach $68 billion, as total business and residential VoIP subscriber numbers grew to reach 212 million, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.
Increased interest in and adoption of cloud services by businesses is driving growth in unified communications (UC) services revenues and subscriber numbers as well, according to excerpts from Infonetics’, “2014 VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers” report.
“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide,” Infonetics’ principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS Diane Myers was quoted in a press release.
“Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up market as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market.”
Infonetics says growth will continue strong worldwide, forecasting VoIP services revenue to increase to total $88 billion in 2018.
Other highlights of the report include:
- SIP trunking shot up 50% in 2013 from the prior year, driven predominantly by activity in North America; EMEA is expected to be a strong contributor in 2014
- Sales of hosted PBX and unified communication (UC) services rose 13% in 2013 over 2012, and seats grew 35% due to continued demand for enterprise cloud-based services
- Managed services are benefiting from the continued adoption of IP PBXs: Roughly 10%–20% of new IP PBX lines sold are part of a managed service or outsourced contract
