ICT decision-makers who ignore internal barriers to the adoption of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) are putting their company at a serious disadvantage.
That’s because the pace of change in the UCC market is heating up as enterprises are gearing up to adopt many UCC applications, despite depressed economies.
This news comes on the back of new UCC research released today by Dimension Data.
Earlier this year, Dimension Data commissioned research firm Ovum to conduct a global UCC survey across Australia, Asia, the USA, Europe, and South Africa.
Over 1 320 enterprise ICT decision-makers and 1 390 employees in a broad spectrum of industry verticals in 18 countries were interviewed.
The results of Dimension Data 2013 Global UCC Study were compared to primary research undertaken for Dimension Data in 2007, before the era of the smartphone, which looked at decision-maker and employee attitudes towards and perceptions of UC; current and future adoption patterns; and perceived benefits.
Tony Munro, Solutions executive: Dimension Data Africa said: “We wanted to look back at our previous research into enterprise adoption of UCC to see how the market has changed. The dramatic shifts which have occurred since 2007 are compelling.”
In 2007, only 35% of the large companies surveyed had deployed IP telephony, with companies in some geographies (in particular developing markets) reporting IP telephony (IPT) penetration rates in the low teens.
This is now over 75%, a dramatic increase considering the maturity of the PBX market and the reluctance of many decision-makers to replace equipment that is otherwise in working order.
In 2007, aside from cost, service and solutions reliability was considered a major inhibitor to investment, but today organisational and decision-making challenges present the biggest barriers. Little noise was made in the past about UCC enabling business process improvement.
Because smart devices had yet to come onto the market, they did not factor in any way in the 2007 research. Today these are major subjects of discussion, planning and management in all enterprise ICT organisations.
In 2007, just over 25% of respondents outsourced any aspect of PBX maintenance and management, and over 60% had no plans whatsoever to ever outsource any aspect of corporate telephony. In this latest research, respondents indicated that they currently benefit from some form of outsourced (managed) service in half of all cases, and over 70% state that they will seriously consider a managed delivery option (premise-based or cloud) in the next two years.
“IPT is now fully mainstream and mature; there are more delivery and management options than ever for organisations seeking flexibility when investing in critical UCC applications; employee-centric strategies are taking hold; enterprise mobility is more important than ever; and there is a new appreciation of the business process improvements which UCC can support,” added Munro.
On the downside, while the research results indicate that enterprises across the globe are evaluating and implementing UCC strategies and technologies with ardour, and seriously considering new deployment models at the level of the single enterprise, justifying and obtaining stakeholder support for a UCC business case may remain a challenge.
“Enterprises that don’t have – or have plans – to adopt UCC technologies, are increasingly finding themselves in a minority,” Munro said.