This Frost & Sullivan research titled Social Media and Unified Communications Market in South Africa and Kenya analyses the uptake of unified communications solutions, which incorporate consumer-web applications, by enterprises in South Africa and Kenya. The study covers key market trends for unified communications solutions in the social media space, provides key vendor profiles and strategic recommendations on how to capitalise on the market opportunities.

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Market Overview

UC Solutions Incorporating Social Media Set to See Increased Uptake in South Africa and Kenya in the Long Term

As consumers are increasingly using social media for business communications, unified collaboration (UC) solution vendors are integrating social features in their solutions for business communications. While the rapidly increasing popularity of these social media applications has led companies globally to adopt them, enterprise uptake in sub-Saharan Africa has been low with only South Africa and Kenya showing signs of increased uptake of UC solutions. Key challenges for vendors has been the small number of early adopters, low awareness of the benefits of social media and the consequent lack of social media strategies among enterprises, concerns over network security and tight budgets.

Nevertheless, the increasing uptake in enterprise contact centres as well as hosted contact centres is expected to drive the market in the medium to long term. One of the major reasons for enterprises deploying social media applications will be the desire to support customer retention initiatives – with a large number of customers using social platforms, companies can use them as a means of communicating with their customers. Companies can also use social media to reduce marketing costs by promoting their products through social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs.

In the short term, the market will be severely reined in by the existing legacy infrastructure already in place. Developing affordable social media solutions that interoperate with legacy infrastructure will help increase market growth. Vendors must also work to educate businesses about the benefits of deploying social CRM tools in their contact centres.

Market Sectors

The following market sectors are covered in this research:

• Hosted contact centres
• Unified messaging
• Conferencing and collaboration
• Enterprise telephony

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• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Benchmark (South Africa and Kenya), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Impact of Top Four Industry Challenges (South Africa and Kenya), 2011-2017
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Market Drivers Ranked in Order of Impact (South Africa and Kenya), 2011-2017
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Market Restraints Ranked in Order of Impact (South Africa and Kenya), 2011-2017
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Key Facts (South Africa), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Users by Key Social Platforms (South Africa), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Products by Key Vendors (South Africa), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Key Facts (Kenya), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Users by Key Social Platforms (Kenya), 2010
• Social Media and Unified Communications Market: Products by Key Platform Vendors (Kenya), 2010