96% of Enterprises Say They Ultimately Will Unify All Communications

For what it is worth, a new survey of 106 enterprises found that 96 percent expect "eventually" to unify all communications modes into a single end user experience, says Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research.

More than half of surveyed companies indicate they already have unified at least some important communications functions and features, and it isn't surprising that the nearly half that haven't moved to do so believe they will do so at some point.

In some ways, such open-ended questions are akin to asking whether enterprises believe all their communications ultimately will use Internet Protocol. It's hard to give any other answer.

Infonetics Research - Unified communications gaining appeal among North American enterprises

Ringio "A Bit Surprised" by End User App Demand

No matter how experienced you might be in the broader unified communications, customers still can surprise you, leading to a "why didn't I think of that?" moment. That's what Michael Zirngibl, Ringio co-founder, recently discovered.

Ringio recently found customers asking for, and so built, a calling center function for small businesses operating in several product lines or spaces, but with a single staff. Basically, Ringio sorts inbound calls according to those lines of business, providing screen pops to staff about which business an inbound call is related to.

The other angle is the integration of customer relationship management features with the screen pops, so an organization call agent knows a bit about call history, and what that particular caller might have been asking for help with, on previous calls.

The same sort of feature allows businesses to track leads as well.

"You don't always know what end users want," says Zirngibl.

Enterprise Communications Still Relies on Email and Voice, Study Suggests

A new study of enterprise workers suggests that workers rely on more traditional forms of communication than social media to drive results, as you might expect. Some 83 percent of professionals say email is “critical” or "very important" to their overall success and productivity, and 81 percent said the same for phone calls.

Email and phone ranked the highest above all other forms of communication with audio conferences third at 61 percent.  Sending or receiving an instant message rated as critical for only 38 percent of respondents while social media ranked last at 19 percent.

If a conversation is about closing a deal or making a mission-critical decision, 77 percent of those polled said they would prefer to do it in person. And of those polled, 65 percent said they preferred talking in person when discussing complicated technical concepts and
64 percent would rather do their brainstorming in person.

In fact, 53 percent of all respondents said that they spend 10 or more hours on the phone each week. How can that be if one-to-one phone calls have declined? It appears that more phone time is spent in audio conferences rather than one-to-one conversations.

About 83 percent of respondents said that they dial into an audio conference “frequently" or "all the time” for work. About 56 percent
said that most calls were made from a desk phone, followed by amobile phone (39 percent) and softphone (five percent).

The survey also suggests enterprise workers are making more use of virtually every form of communications with the possible exception of traditional phone calls.

Plantronics surveyed 1,800 enterprise employees in the US, UK, Germany, China, India and Australia. All work in medium or large size companies (100+ employees) and identified themselves as knowledge workers (people whose work centers on developing or working primarily with ideas and information) who use a variety of communications technologies to stay in touch with colleagues, partners and clients. The research was conducted in May and June of 2010.

Google Voice Podcast

Jim Burton, Dave Michels,Samantha Kane, Jon Arnold, Michael Finneran, Art Rosenberg, Don Van Doren, and Steve Leaden talk about the implications Google Voice poses for the broader unified communications space. 
 listen here

UC is Changing Channel Requirements

Channel organizations have faced change ever since IP communications began to displace older voice technologies, principally by increasing technology skills requirements.

The complexity of UC implementations, especially in multi-vendor environments, requires a significant vendor or channel partner implementation and integration expertise, notes Melanie Turek, Frost & Sullivan principal analyst.

Most companies with more than a few dozen employees will deploy UC across technology from at least two vendors. That will involve integration, and since it's unlikely those two vendors are plug-and-play today, that integration will require services, she says.

The nature of channel partnerships also is changing as IT and telecom staffs converge with the shift to software-centric solutions, and with businesses increasingly virtualizing their data centers and communications infrastructures.

http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2010/06/the_channel_is.html

98% of Fortune 1000 Firms Have UC Tests, Deployments or Plans

Only two percent of Fortune 1000 companies are not already in active pilot or deployment or are considering a unified communications implementation, a survey sponsored by Plantronics finds.

The only thing surprising in that finding is that there are any Fortune 1000 firms that are not using, planning or testing a UC implementation of some kind.

Given the wide range of UC applications, it would seem unlikely that any firms large enough to qualify for the Fortune 1000 list would not already be using some unified communications apps, whether they know it or not.

The survey suggests 34 percent of workers at such firms are road warriors while 29 percent are telecommuters (working mostly from home). As workforces become more distributed, technology that connects people and enables real-time collaboration becomes essential.

About 94 percent of those surveyed plan to roll out voice-related UC apps within the next 24 months while 66 percent of respondents plan to deploy desktop video within the next two years.

Some 45 percent of respondents said end-user training is key to help users understand basic audio and voice end-point functionality and to enable them to customize options and solve basic issues on their own.

Similarly, 48 percent of respondents said it’s critical to train IT on audio end-points, so they can educate users about end-points and resolve potential issues before they arise.

Employees who are accustomed to using traditional desk phones have very high expectations for audio quality. In fact, more than 50 percent of decision makers said end-points and audio quality are “extremely important” to the overall UC experience. If audio quality is poor when talking to customers, partners and other important audiences, users won’t adopt UC and deployments fail.

Is UC Still Relevant and Growing?

IP-based communications often has not developed as its supporters have forecast. Suppliers thought it was an "enterprise" product, but VoIP erupted in the consumer space. That actually has been the rule, of late, not the exception.

Email, the Internet, instant messaging, text messaging, search, social networking, broadband and mobility all gained traction in the consumer space and then were forced upon enterprises.

Has unified communications now been superseded by social media and mobile devices? For many enterprise executives, that is a rhetorical question, though it might not be so rhetorical for smaller organizations or individuals.

Contact centers remain the province of enterprise-class unified communications solutions and nearly all office environments, as well as for traveling workers who need access to home office communications features.

Global businesses likewise benefit from enterprise-grade unified communications more than small, local businesses and organizations.

Since supplier organizations tend to mirror the organizations they sell to, that means many large suppliers of unified communications believe in its value because they themselves are large, far-flung organizations in best position to leverage UC and other collaboration tools.

What is not so self evidently clear is that the same level of benefit is obtained by smaller, more localized user organizations and firms.

"These customers aren’t worried about presence and a unified portal," says David Burnand, a former Siemens enterprise communications executive. In fact, "many of them run their business using mobile handsets, simple PBXs, social media, Skype and Google Voice."

Many use elements of unified communications, including single number services, video-calling and instant messaging. They just don’t call it unified communications, or use those tools because they are "unified." They use point solutions because they solve real problems.

The point, says Burnand, is that "old school" definitions of unified communications do not hold.

UC is no longer about managing a desk phone, mobile, Windows PC and many other devices. The smart phone has made that view redundant for all except the power users, he argues.

Instead, it is evolving into skinny applications for low-end users and specialist applications for power users, mixed with a dose of social media, a splash of video and a few Web-based collaboration tools.

That will be an unsettling view for many unified communications or collaboration suppliers, as it suggests the "UC market" is far smaller than many would have predicted for hoped for.

Unified Communications is Not a New Market, says Frost and Sullivan

"Unified communications is not a new market," argues Melanie Turek, Frost and Sullivan analyst. Mostly, it is a repackaging of many existing businesses, ranging from business phone systems to collaboration software suites.

That doesn't mean there are not some new products, industry segments and providers. But most of the revenue is driven by legacy products, she suggests.

"It's a way for vendors in existing markets to continue making money," says Turek. "The biggest impetus for the players in this space to keep playing isn't to deliver new business revenue; it's to stop existing, or past, revenues from disappearing—not to another vendor (although that's always a risk), but from the market altogether."

In many cases, the goal is simply to give customers a reason to upgrade. "Unless those vendors can deliver a compelling reason for companies to move to the next version of their communications and collaboration software, companies aren't going to," says Turek.

And the telephony vendors have it even worse: Hard phones and network gear should be built to last: sometimes decades or more, says Turek. " And except in certain specific use cases, like the contact center, businesses don’t need or want to add more features to their employees' handsets."

That doesn't mean there isn't a market for UC, she says. There are new applications. But those new products might simply serve to keep those vendors in business.

The question for vendors, then, is how to grab a bigger piece of the already-existing pie, says Turek.  And that is what makes quantifying the size of the UC market so difficult.

Voxbone Adds Text Messages to Global Phone Numbers

Proponents have argued that  new IP-based communications would offer many innovative features not possible on older telephone networks. Voxbone, for example, now provides "global phone numbers" that are not tied to a specific country, and now has added text message support for those numbers, a feature that will be welcomed by users who see the advantages of a single, global telephone number.

Voxbone’s carrier and enterprise customers now can offer their subscribers one global number that can receive SMS messages at competitive rates, on mobile phones that do not have Internet access. In other words, it works the way the current services do, in terms of user interface and experience.

The move marks something of a potential breakthrough in "iNum" usage, as wireless subscribers from a growing number of prominent carriers, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Virgin, and Boost Mobile, now are able to send text messages to iNum "phone" numbers.

The service is already available in the United Kingdom, France and the United States, at prices ranging from 10 to 20 pence per message in the United Kingdom., for example.

Voxbone will be adding reachability from more wireless carriers in more countries in the coming weeks.

The new feature highlights another interesting angle: Landline phones have not traditionally been able to receive text messages. It isn't entirely clear how many people would find this interesting or useful. But it could be done.

All iNum numbers have a prefix of +883, the International Telecommunications Union-assigned international code for the Internet, just as +44 is the code for the U.K. and +1 refers to the U.S.
As a wholesaler of direct-inward-dial numbers and IP transport provider, Voxbone receives calls, and now SMS messages, to numbers with this code and delivers them over IP to its carrier customers, for delivery to their end users.

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.

IT Professionals Don't Think Much of Enterprise Communications, Study Suggests

In a recent survey of 544 information technology professionals, Freeform Dynamics discovered that relatively few U.K. and U.S. IT professionals are satisfied that their communications capabilities are highly efficient and effective.

Except for firms with fewer than 10 employees, less than 20 percent of respondents indicated their communications capabilities were, in fact, very well suited to current business requirements.

You may take that as a good sign that much upside continues to exist for unified and advanced communications that IT professionals believe really help their organizations perform more effectively.

But you might also take it as a sign that the industry, collectively, has done a poor job of creating and delivering on solutions that IT professionals believe are well suited to business requirements. Either way, the Freeform Dynamics study suggests there is much opportunity to provide solutions that actually are perceived to deliver value.

One is tempted to say we haven't done a very good job with unified communications, but it might be worse than that. We might not have done such a great job with communications, period.

Conferencing Now Part of UC, Study Finds

UC is often thought of as a broad solution set including a unified directory, unified messaging, a single number (find me, follow me), presence awareness and the ability to track all forms of communication, say Josie Sephton and Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics researchers.

What seems to have changed lately is the increased role conferencing solutions seem to be playing as parts of an integrated UC solution. Among lead adopters, audio conferencing is viewed as a mandatory feature by more than 70 percent of information technology executives surveyed by Freeform Dynamics.

More than 40 percent of all respondents said that audio conferencing is mandatory (Click on image to see larger view).

Nearly 20 percent of the most-aggressive UC adopters say video calling is mandatory, while more than 65 percent say that features is "desirable." So far, fewer than 10 percent of all respondents say video calling is mandatory.

About 25 percent of early UC adopters say video conferencing is a mandatory UC feature, and about 55 percent of early adopters say Web conferencing is a mandatory UC feature.

Instant messaging is seen by more than 80 percent of early adopters as a mandatory feature. Nearly 40 percent of all enterprise IT executives say IM is necessary.