Unified Communications Seems Less Important than Conferencing, Survey Suggests

For almost a decade now, the industry has touted unified communications (UC) and VoIP as technologies that can help individuals collaborate, improve worker productivity and dramatically lower the total cost of corporate communications.

However, despite the promise and hype, the majority of UC applications deployed today revolve around basic conferencing services and unified messaging.

UC applications such as presence and mobile integration remain low in both adoption and plans to adopt. Click on the image for a larger view.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

Google Adds Real-Time Search, With its Own Web Page

Google has added a special "real time" search application to its suite of search-related tools, giving "Google realtime" its own dedicated web page.

When it first introduced our real-time search features last December, Google wanted to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime (the page is rolling out now and should be available soon. Use this link if you want to try out the new features right away).

Premises IP Telephony Issues About What You'd Expect

A survey of 475 ShoreTel prospective customers found key issues you might expect, including desires for simplicity, reliability, ease of use and management, reduced costs, and easier integration with business processes.

Nearly 81 percent of respondents expressed a desire to simplify their communications system yet only 47 percent, less than half, have actual goals in place to help them achieve this.

Of system capabilities most important to IT managers,  80 percent of respondents indicated ease of use for end users, 80 percent indicated reliability, and 76 percent indicated ease of management.

The survey also revealed that the highest ranked causes of complexity are “Integrating communications system with business processes,” “integrating new equipment with legacy systems,” and “the number of remote or mobile workers.”

The top three system qualities that are most important to end users include ease of use, reliability, and sound quality.

Among the issues seen as most challenging were management time and complexity; costs for moves, adds, and changes; end-user complaints and difficulties; and inconsistent or incompatible systems.

Other irritations were after-sale costs, which 65 percent of respodents indicated they were frustrated by “many invisible costs after purchase.”

About 63 percent were frustrated by “systems that are hard and costly to manage” and 57 percent were frustrated by “systems that are complex and hard to use and learn.”

None of that should come as news to suppliers of IP telephony systems.

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For Enterprise Non-Traditional Stakeholders, Online Networks Will Be Key

Large enterprises these days find they have lots of non-traditional stakeholders, apart from investors, employees and customers. The largest enterprises have to deal with non-governmental organizations, special interest groups, research groups, citizen groups, universities and charitable organizations, for example.

The direct risks for large enterprises are damage to company reputation as well as the costs of managing such relationships, loss of market share and sales revenue, according to a an Economist Intelligence Unit study.

The study found 78 percent of the respondents say interaction with special-interest groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or citizen groups is important to their business, while 33 percent say that online communities will be their most important category of "non-traditional stakeholder" in five years.

In part, the reason is that the non-traditional stakeholders will be using presence-enabled applications, converged fixed-mobile communications, online white boarding, team workspaces, blogs, podcasts and wikis that enterprises will have to respond to.

In essence, the study suggests large enterprises must learn to use the same tools the non-traditional stakeholders do, or risk damage to their reputations, intellectual property or even market share and revenues.

read the study

Apple's Enteprise Strategy? Target People

It’s possible Apple will become more enterprise-centric in the future, but not because Apple will spend much more effort than it now does to reach enterprise buyers.

Instead, Apple aims its products and people, not enterprises. If people want to use its products at work, Apple assumes they will.

Apple Doesn’t Target Markets. It Targets People

Social Media Affects SMB Purchasing

A recent study by the SMB Group gathered data from 475 respondents working at companies with less than 1,000 employees.

The study found that social media sites have significant relevance when small or mid-sized business executives and personnel are weighing product or service purchases.

Click on image for a larger view. 

You might suspect younger users would rely on social media and the study suggests that is true. But the study also finds that users in all age ranges consider social media significant sources of information.

The differences are that older users are more likely to rely on advice from colleagues than younger users are. For users 34 or younger, colleagues and social media are about equally important.

For user 35 to 40 colleagues are slightly more important. For users older than 40 there still is a tendency to rely on advice form colleagues. But even in the worst case, social media is viewed as more important than advice from business advisors.

Study: Social Media Affects SMB Purchasing Decisions

Consumer study shows changing TV behavior

Internet-based TV is growing rapidly, with 50 percent of the consumers using it every week, says Ericsson.

The study shows that people are spending up to 35 percent of their leisure time watching TV and video content, and that consumers are becoming more aware of new technologies, which in turn are creating new patterns of media consumption.

At least once a week, 93 percent are still watching scheduled 'linear' broadcast TV, but the role of broadcast TV is changing owing to the introduction of new distribution channels.

More than 70 percent of consumers surveyed are streaming, downloading or watching recorded broadcast TV on a weekly basis, and 50 percent are using internet-based on-demand TV/video every week.

Data was collected in China, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK and US.

Consumer study shows changing TV behavior - Ericsson