Industry news

UC has not hit IP as forecasted, says IDC

Unified communications (UC) have not had as great an impact on the growth of IP telephony lines as initially forecasted, one market analyst has said.

IDC claims the IP telephony market recorded shipments of 30.9 million last year according to its study.

Nora Freedman, a senior analyst at the firm, said Microsoft and IBM both shipped their first versions of unified communications solutions at the end of 2007.

"So, IP telephony vendors no longer had to speculate about what effect the desktop-based collaborative environments with IP telephony would have."

IDC's research revealed desktop collaborative environments, open source IP PBX and hosted VoIP services as potential threats to the market.

Meanwhile, the analyst announced last week that its new Document Management Solutions study found businesses are producing more hardcopies now than five years ago.

It predicts the days of a paperless office are years away.

According to the organisation, nearly 60 per cent of firms said they are printing more than they had been doing so in 2003.