NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In its latest research, the 2011-2012 North America SMB Unified Communications Overview, AMI-Partners found that while deployment of full or complete Unified Communications (UC) solutions in North America is low, adoption of its individual components is actually rather high. More than half of small and medium businesses (SMBs, or firms with 1-999 employees) are using at least one individual UC component rather than a complete solution. This discrepancy indicates a need for a better segmented product bundle.
“SMBs in North America have shown resistance to adopting full UC solutions, not realizing that they already pay for a number of the individual components”, says Brian Galgay, Manager of Cloud Services at AMI. “The challenge is guiding these SMBs to the full solution. Once SMBs break the initial pay-barrier, up-selling from a basic solution to a fully integrated UC solution will need guidance and structure”, Galgay continued.
North American SMB service providers wishing to compete for this opportunity need to segment their UC portfolio, targeting a range of SMBs from basic single-point solutions users to full UC solution customers and all segments in between. Most providers today offer either a full UC suite or only operate in specialized areas of voice, conferencing, or messaging services. More often than not, SMBs opt out of the full UC solution and patch together a mix from these fragmented offerings. “Most SMBs need several UC components on a daily basis, but not necessarily all elements of a complete solution. Currently, few vendors are willing to break apart their full UC suite to capture the share and revenues from a structured series of UC bundles mapped to SMB needs,” Galgay stated.
The UC outlook is attractive: over the next five years, the SMB opportunity for UC components in North America is expected to more than double. Given the massive potential size of the total addressable market for UC components, adoption of single solutions will continue, with “bootstrapped” solutions aimed at the low end of the market. However, as advanced customers develop more use-cases and needs, the number of SMBs using multiple UC components will reach a tipping point, and the full UC providers’ opportunity will become more prominent. “The revenue opportunity in winning full UC SMB customers is large, but to do so vendors need to provide structure and guide these SMBs along the path from single components to a full UC solution”, says Galgay.
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The 2011-2012 North America SMB Unified Communications Overview is part of AMI’s Unified Communications Practice, which provides research-based market intelligence on the demand for UC products and services among global SMBs and essential guidance on key elements of Unified Communications solutions to maximize the SMBs’ likelihood to purchase and corresponding uptake.
For more information about these studies, AMI, or our other global SMB research, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — focusing on global small and medium business (SMB) enterprises. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest-quality data, business planning and go-to-market solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.