Leading industry analyst firms such as Gartner, IDC and Forrester predict an annual growth of approximately 30% in the Cloud comunications market. While fully hosted cloud-based models are growing in popularity, the bulk of this hosted services growth comes from the increased demand from organizations that want a combination of management of their existing, dedicated communications infrastructures, plus cloud-based applications.
The traditional, rip and replace, cloud services model has typically failed companies in the past, as it simply replaces internal problems with external ones, and offers far less flexibility and control of the company’s strategic communications needs. Companies want to have hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions, rather than fully cloud based, where they improve their operational cost structure, but don't have to completely rip and replace their existing investments.
This hybid-cloud approach offers a highly flexible, full-feature service with low capital and operating costs. This approach enables new commercial models, such as “pay by the drink”, event-based services, and increasingly, the delivery of cloud-based collaboration services.
The cloud services market will be supplied by carriers, outsource service providers, tier-2/3 managed service providers (MSPs), and potentially in the future, suppliers such as Google, Skype and Amazon will enter the market. But only the carriers will be able to support a true hybrid cloud solution.
