Forrester Research is confirming MSPmentor’s long-time assertion that companies increasingly want managed service providers to deliver and maintain unified communications.

According to a research note from Forrester, the number of unified communications and pilots has increased more than 20 percent since last year. I expected even faster growth rates, since the UC market has a small installed based and is just getting started.

We placed unified communications on our emerging technology list when charting the MSP hype cycle earlier this year. Here’s why Forrester thinks MSPs and unified communications are an ideal match.

When it comes to unified communications, customers are dealing with:

Forrester goes on to say:

I agree with Forrester’s assertions, but I think we still have to be careful of the findings. For the most part, the information is based on vendor — rather than customer — interviews.

In fact, Forrester only interviewed eight vendor and user companies (AT&T, British Telecommunications (BT), Cisco Systems, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), IBM, Microsoft, Orange Business Services, and Verizon). All of those vendors have a vested interest in unified communications’ success.

Interviews with midsize and large corporate customers (outside of the service provider market) would have given us an even better feel for UC demand trends.

You can learn more about the report on Forrester’s Web site. And you can find info about additional MSP research reports here.