All the trends, lists, predictions are out now. Of course, UC is will see record growth and Cloud Computing too. No kidding! They are both in infancy (relatively speaking), so there is nowhere to go but up. Any halfwit that "predicted" that is just blowing hot air into his blog, tweet and press release to get some SEO juice with the trendy marketing buzz words.

XO tweeted this: "about 75% of specs drawn up by companies looking 2 upgrade communications have some form of #UC on their lists"

UC is a garbage can term that some marketing team came up with. Unified Communications encompasses VoIP, video, conferencing, presence, IM/chat, SMS/text, and now SocialCRM. That's the whole comm bucket, folks. So that should be 100% of companies are looking to upgrade to some form of UC.

During my chat with XO's Pete Davis today, we were talking about XO's UC value proposition. It's about having the various components for communications available to inter-operate together.

Having a bundle or a package for Hosted UC is great IF it will inter-op with company processes and other applications like CRM, databases, PBX, firewall, etc. 

It's more like UC is a sandbox. Can the vendors play in that sandbox together in order for the customer to realize the true benefits of unified messaging, seamless telecom, mobility? We'll see but my bet is on not yet. For those wondering if UC will grow in 2011-2014: Probably. As this blog points out, successful case studies do not abound. If it turns out that UC is vaporware in terms of true benefits to the corporate bottom line, growth will stagnate. Or if it becomes a technological hurdle for small businesses to integrate.