Market for Unified Communications in North America Buoyant

By Mini Swamy, TMCnet Contributor

As part of its Continuous Research Service series of analyst notes and surveys on the enterprise VoIP and unified communications market, Infonetics Research, an international market research and consulting firm serving the communications industry since 1990, released excerpts from its North American Enterprise Survey.

According to Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics (News - Alert), 96 percent of companies that use multi-modal communications plan to integrated the various modes into a single user experience. This was, in spite of the fact that vendors had sowed confusion in the minds of users. However, largely due to the fact that the concept of unification has strong appeal as it ultimately simplifies the lives of users and increases their productivity, medium and large enterprises are veering towards Unified communications.

Other findings of the unified communication survey revealed that among North American medium and large enterprises, Cisco (News - Alert) emerged as the leading IP telephony provider, while Microsoft dominated the e-mail and IM sector with Google not very far behind. The top reasons that were cited for deploying UC were improved employee productivity, reduced operational costs and executive demand. Lastly, UC was being delivered not only over desktop PCs, but also over laptops, tablets and smartphones.

For the purpose of the UC Product Features and Vendor Leadership survey, 106 U.S. and Canadian companies with a minimum of 100 employees that were using multiple types of communication were interviewed. The survey included questions about the UC models deployed, expenditures incurred, criteria for service provider selection, and what was to be gained or lost by UC deployment. It also included an analysis of vendors.

Infonetics conducted related research on the gain of SIP trunking on TI lines, the state of the enterprise telephony market, the trends of hosted and business VoIP services and the leadership struggle in the UC market. It is a leader in defining and tracking emerging and established technologies in all world regions, Infonetics helps clients plan, strategize, and compete more effectively.

(source: http://hosted-exchange.tmcnet.com/topics/unified-communications/articles/115572-market-unified-communications-north-america-buoyant.htm)