Mobile commerce is a trend that is naturally growing as more smartphones enter the market, and users want to do more with their handsets. Being able to carry out transactions on retail sites via digital currency has been a vision that a relatively larger number of companies have embraced, and near-field communications tech is the catalyst.

Juniper is evidently sharing these high-hopes, posting a very bold forecast about the state of NFC in 2015.  The networking gear maker expects this innovation to transform into a $74 billion market within the next three years, citing several historical reasons. The company said that NFC has achieved three times as much growth as it was projected to last year, and that demand from consumers will continue to act a big driver on the longer run.

“Juniper’s David Snow explained in the report the “spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than triple in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.”

Juniper’s report sheds some new light on NFC, but from an entirely different point of view. Cisco released a similarly optimistic forecast about the cloud not too long ago; another IT trend that is seeing tremendous growth, and is carrying the networking industry with it.  Perhaps Juniper may be planning to make an entry of its own into the hopefully profitable NFC scene sometime in the future.

Getting back to mobile payments, near-field communications is far from the only thing going on in this space. A new startup called Clover is hoping to make an impact and standardize its own payment platform, which leverages analytics and a few simple innovations to achieve the same convenience NFC is gunning for.