Deployment of unified communications solutions is poised for growth as organizations build on a foundation of voice and data applications to include more video, collaboration and social communications tools, according to new research from CompTIA, the non-profit association for the IT industry. Unified communications seamlessly blends these communication tools within a single user interface to improve employee collaboration, productivity and customer service and boost the efficiency of the IT infrastructure.
Nearly half (49 percent) of the organizations surveyed for the new CompTIA study, “Unified Communications and Collaboration Market Trends,” said their expenditures on unified communications technologies will grow relatively faster than their overall IT budget over the next 12 months. Large firms (500 or more employees) are significantly more likely to increase their unified communications investment relative to the overall IT budget than the smallest of firms (1-49 employees), 64 percent vs. 35 percent.
“This likely reflects the complexity of communications at a large firm compared to a small firm,” said Tim Herbert, vice president, research, CompTIA. “More staff, more locations, more endpoints and possibly more IT systems make for a more complex communications landscape and a stronger desire to simplify through a unified communications strategy.”
While IT companies and their customers are bullish on the future of unified communications, the CompTIA study indicates that greater clarity about what constitutes unified communications is needed. Customers and their technology partners are fairly consistent when asked to define unified communications. For each group, core areas include email, web conferencing, unified messaging, videoconferencing, audio conferencing and IP communications. But despite the media attention on technologies such as social communication and location-based services, they are not yet strongly associated with unified communications, according to the study.
Additionally, fewer respondents have made the leap from viewing unified communications as an incremental improvement for interaction and sharing to higher-level, communications-enabled business processes. This is seen in the relatively lower numbers of respondents making a strong connection between unified communications with other enterprise systems such as customer relationship management tools.
Technology providers also have several hurdles to overcome with customers. These challenges include price sensitivity, cited by 39 percent of respondents; reliability concerns, cited by 36 percent; security concerns, cited by 34 percent; and difficulty in quantifying return on investment, cited by 33 percent. In addition, 32 percent of respondents reported a general lack of understanding of unified communications products and services.
Many of the technologies associated with unified communications are already widely adopted. For example, 64 percent of organizations surveyed use web conferencing, 58 percent use videoconferencing; 54 percent use collaboration applications or platforms and 51 percent use voice over IP (VoIP).
“The integration of all these elements is the hard part, tying all these things together,” said Seth Robinson, director, technology analysis, CompTIA. “Voice and data will still be important but more effort will be devoted to complement them by bringing more video, collaboration and social elements into the enterprise.”
Before this can happen, however, organizations must perform a network analysis to determine if their network can support the requirements for new solutions. Indeed, among companies in the CompTIA study that have installed a VoIP solution, 61 percent upgraded network equipment such as routers and switches and 51 percent upgraded infrastructure such as cabling and network drops.
“Voice and video are the components of a solution that will drive network upgrades since they consume the most bandwidth and must be handled properly to assure high quality,” Robinson explained.
Still, the rewards are worth the effort. As the reach and range of business processes continues to increase, involving interactions with partners, suppliers, customers and geographically dispersed teams, “siloed” communications infrastructures will no longer meet business requirements. Unified communication services can help organizations improve employee productivity, augment business processes and foster innovation.
