12 Oct 2020

**SINGAPORE, October 13^th ** , 2020 – The unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) market has been consistently gaining traction across the world and in Asia/Pacific following the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown restrictions imposed by local governments, work from home policies, and social distancing protocol have resulted in disruption of normal life and created the need for remote collaboration among employees across the distributed workplace. IDC Asia/Pacific’s latest report titled Asia/Pacific Unified Communication and Collaboration Market Assessment highlights end-user adoption trends, drivers, vendor shares and landscape, and market size assessment in 2019.

“With the impact of COVID-19, there is a requirement of developing solutions which will enable users to collaborate seamlessly with their colleagues across hybrid work environments such as working from office, on the go, and from home. With public internet being utilized to remotely connect with coworkers, having a secure connection should be a priority. Hence, delivering a device agnostic, user-friendly, and secured collaboration solution will then be the key to success,” says Abhishek Mukherjee, Senior Market Analyst for Telecommunications and IoT at IDC Asia/Pacific.

IDC estimates the Asia/ Pacific UC&C market to reach US$ 7.9B by the end of 2020 growing by 18% from the previous year – owing to demand from businesses and organizations for guidance in provisioning, supporting, scaling, and/or enhancing videoconferencing and collaboration solutions for work-from-home/ remotely working employees. With the rapid adoption of cloud-based collaboration application in the region due to COVID-19, the Asia/Pacific UC&C Market is expected to outpace the worldwide growth rate with its 5-year compound annual growth rate of 7.1%.

Other key highlights of the report:

• Cloud-based collaboration applications are on the rise and constitutes the lion's share in the market to facilitate the remote workforce. This is also replacing the legacy segments like audio, video, and business telephone systems.
• UC&C applications are gaining traction in newer use-cases which were predominantly offline in nature (e.g. online training, Telemedicine, government cabinet meetings, content production, Judicial proceedings, events, sales meetings, etc.).

Based on the research, the channel partner ecosystem is also evolving with the introduction of new age channel partners. While the channel for UC&C is dominated by System Integrators and Value-added resellers and VARs, communication service providers and new age partners (e.g. commercial real estate consultants, builders, and vertical experts) are here to deliver more scale to the vendors and superior experience to the vendors.

IDC has been tracking the development of leading regional and global telecommunications service providers in the market through its core research on 5G, CAPEX market forecasts, IoT Access and Traffic, IoT Spending, Managed SD-Wan, Telecom Services, as well as business sentiment surveys around carrier transformation, next-generation software-defined networks and collaboration.

IDC's Asia/Pacific Communications Service Provider Business Transformation Strategies looks at the current telecom landscape and how communication SPs and technology vendors can leverage their core assets to transform their business and stay ahead of the competition. Today's communication service providers (communication SPs) are facing a double-edged sword in the form of a fast changing and an increasingly unfamiliar market environment. To overcome the challenges born out of rapidly evolving enterprise and consumer demands coupled with thinning margins from traditional telco services, the communication SPs must transform their business models, product and service offerings, and engagement strategies. To learn more, contact Nikhil Batra at nbatra@idc.com or click HERE.

Asia/Pacific Unified Communication and Collaboration Market Assessment, 2019–2020 is one of the reports under IDC Asia/Pacific Communications Service Provider Business Transformation Strategies series. Other upcoming reports are as follows: Future of Work - CPaaS driving enterprise collaboration tech strategies; Future of work and connected employees; Monetizing the customer experience and contextual marketing; Telco play in the multi-cloud world – Orchestration platforms and marketplace; and AI Leading the way to Software-defined Self-healing Networks. For more information on this report, please contact Abhishek Mukherjee at amukherjee@idc.com.

For media inquiries, please contact Theresa Rago at trago@idc.com or Alvin Afuang at aafuang@idc.com.

*Note: Asia/Pacific excluding Japan