Monday Morning Impact – September 9
IDC: Worldwide Spending on Artificial Intelligence to Reach $632 Billion in 2028
The worldwide unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) market is forecast to reach $69.1 billion in revenue in 2024, an increase of 7.5% compared to 2023, according to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC). During the 2023-2028 forecast period, the UC&C market is expected to witness a slightly lower compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7% to reach $85 billion by 2028.
“The UC&C market has matured after significant investments were made in the past few years by businesses to address the changed work environment,” said Jitesh Gera, research manager, Unified Communications and Collaboration at IDC. “In addition, the crowded UC&C market has led many solutions toward commoditization. However, AI is now changing the game altogether, bringing a fresh wave of new and differentiated capabilities that are likely to draw more investments in the coming years as businesses vie for enhanced employee productivity and better customer engagement.”
Looking across the key technology segments of the UC&C market, the two software segments — UC collaboration (meeting software without voice telephony subscriptions) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) (meeting software including voice telephony subscriptions) — accounted for most of the worldwide market revenue (89% in 2023). Their share is expected to rise further as growth in the hardware segments (IP telephony and enterprise videoconferencing systems) turns negative over the forecast period. Meanwhile, the UC collaboration segment is forecast to outpace the overall market with a five-year CAGR of 7.6%.
Microsoft continued to lead the worldwide UC&C market with a 44.7% market share by revenue in Q1 2024. Zoom and Cisco followed distantly with a 6.4% and 5.5% market share respectively.
Among the drivers of UC&C adoption is the continued introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into UC&C solutions, such as AI-enabled videoconferencing and telephony solutions. IDC also expects cloud-based UC&C deployments will increase over time, replacing on-premises deployments as security and data integrity continue to improve. And the integration of UC solutions with contact center platforms will continue as buyers look to simplify their technology stacks and reduce their administrative load to work with single unified providers of UC, CC, and CPaaS capabilities.
Channel Impact®
The data measure the ongoing migration of communications systems – an area in which channel partners can add substantial value.
Accenture and AWS Collaborate on AI Adoption
Accenture is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a new platform to help organizations more effectively adopt and scale AI solutions.
“Our work with AWS is focused on helping our clients establish and embed responsible AI at scale, closing the gap between principles and action,” said Arnab Chakraborty, chief responsible AI officer, Accenture. “For the first time, Accenture plans to offer comprehensive end-to-end services spanning AI governance setup, AI risk assessment, generative AI testing, ongoing compliance support, regulation management and security for AWS workloads.”
The ”Accenture Responsible AI Platform powered by AWS” is intended to integrate the core elements of responsible AI to help clients create an ongoing cycle of monitoring, testing and remediating for compliance throughout the enterprise. Tuned for AWS workloads, it offers a unified view of assets, open-source tools and industry standards for responsible AI.
The new platform is designed to enable clients to more easily understand what they need to do in order to identify specific AI risks, develop appropriate risk mitigation approaches and support compliance with specific fast-changing regulations.
“This platform will make it easier for customers to use our growing portfolio of responsible AI solutions, and provide a holistic assessment as well as ongoing monitoring and testing to help clients with their compliance obligations in a rapidly evolving regulatory environment,” said Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS. “With Accenture, we are empowering more customers to experiment and innovate safely with generative AI.”
Channel Impact®
The platform enables business leaders and their channel partners to assess the organization’s readiness or maturity level for AI, and perform risk screenings leveraging benchmark data from multiple industries.
Human Security Launches Channel Program
Human Security, Inc., a New York-based cybersecurity company, as announced the launch of its new partner program, based on a three-tiered structure focused on annualized bookings, training, and retention.
“As our customers face new and unprecedented threats on their applications and accounts, we must work with a partner who has the comprehensive coverage and unmatched human support to stop these attacks,” said Nate Ungerott, CEO, Consortium Networks. “Human Security, with its enhanced mitigation, analysis, and reporting capabilities, will continue to bring exceptional value to our customers as they defend against even the most sophisticated fraud techniques.”
Program features include scalable rewards mapped to partner engagement and customer retention; partner training; joint planning, marketing, and selling; and proposal-based marketing funds.
The company protects organizations by disrupting bot attacks, digital fraud and abuse, impacting the economics of cybercrime by increasing the cost to cybercriminals. The company claims coverage of more than 20 trillion digital interactions per week across advertising, marketing, e-commerce, government, education and enterprise security.
Channel Impact®
The program opens new revenue streams for channel partners by offering protection from online fraud and AI-driven bot attacks.
Stay in the Know
Keep tabs on what’s happening in the channel and the impact it will have on the partner community by subscribing to Channel Impact communications.
Recent News
Search Buzz
Buzz Categories
