83% of Enterprises Have Deployed Unified Communications

About 83 percent of 745 North American enterprise and mid-market executives have unified communications capabilities in place, or are planning to, while 17 percent report they still are not interested, says Henry Dewing, Forrester Research analyst.

Web conferencing and collaboration services, though, are seen as a priority by 55 percent of SMB respondents, as well as storage and backup services, also seen as a priority by 55 percent of SMB respondents.

Integrated communications that unify voice, email and instant messaging are the most-wanted capabilities, with twice the number of executives saying that is important, compared to other features such as presence, integration with business applications, can conferencing capabilities.

That isn’t to say there is little or no interest in features such as desktop call control or mobile integration, but that demand for those features is about 2.5 times less important than unified handling of voice, email and IM traffic.

And while demand for specific features is relatively unevenly distributed, the business value drivers are fairly broadly distributed. Saving money, providing better customer service, improving communication flows and saving time all are cited as key values.

At a time of very-tight information technology budgets, more than a third of respondents say they are hiking spending on hardware, servers and desktop software. About 15 percent report they are increasing spending for managed UC services.

The situation at small and medium-sized businesses and organizations is a bit different, as you might suspect. Where 83 percent of enterprises have unified communications projects in place or in progress, only about 24 percent of SMBs say that is the case at their organizations.

And about 20 percent of SMB executives surveyed say they really have no interest in UC.

And though it seems logical to many of us that SMBs remain prime candidates for hosted services that avoid major capital investments, most SMB executives say they are more interested in premises-based solutions.

When asked how interested they are in buying a managed UC solution sometime in the next 12 months, 56 percent of SMB executives say they “are not interested.”

About 21 percent say they are “somewhat” interested while four percent say they are “very interested.” About 11 percent of SMB executives surveyed by Forrester Research say they currently are using a hosted UC solution.

So it appears industry advocates have some ways yet to go in convincing SMB executives that hosted UC solutions are a better approach than premises solutions.

Recent surveys of IP telephony adoption by SMBs have suggested a similar attitude towards hosted IP telephony as well. About a quarter of SMB executives say they would consider a hosted IP telephony solution, while about three quarters still say they would be more comfortable with a premises-based solution.

Call it habit, inertia or lack of trust. SMB executives still have not embraced hosted IP telephony at rates many of us expected. Some have suggested that fear about making a mistake with a mission critical tool is compounded by fear of choosing the wrong supplier.

Extreme fragmentation of the supplier base, as also is typical of the information technology support business, means no single name generally stands out—in the service provider space—as a “logical” supplier of IP telephony or unified communications.

On the other hand, buyers seem more familiar with the brand names of the firms supplying them phone systems, which then are likely vehicles for a move to IP telephony or unified communications as well.

So far, the hosted IP telephony industry does not seem to have tipped the scales, though one might argue that 25 percent penetration of the customer base for a relatively new solution is not shabby.