Survey Finds Shockingly Low UC Adoption

Maybe it's just me, but after decades of the industry talking about, and delivering, unified messaging features, and after more than a decade of pushing other features such as unified directories, find me-follow me and other "unified" communications features, it still does not appear that all that many organizations really are using them.

Or so it would appear after a survey of 544 information technology professionals in the United States and United Kingdom by Freeform Dynamics.

The study suggests there currently is what some of us might call "shockingly low" adoption of unified communications. You might have thought otherwise, given the shift to new terminology such as "unified communications and collaboration." That might suggest saturation of UC, and a need for UCC.

The Freeform Dynamics might indicate something else: perhaps customers are not so enamored of the UC solutions they have been offered. Suppliers can react in a couple of ways. Maybe customers and prospects simply do not understand the value, in which case marketing and education should do the trick.

The other tack is to humbly acknowledge that the solutions we have been offering do not add enough value, do not offer additional value at the right price points, or that there are unarticulated problems we have not addressed.

The Freedorm Dynamics study might suggest that the industry has not yet found the "killer app" that makes UCC or UC intuitively valuable to most prospects and buyers.