TMC’s (News - Alert) Rajani Baburajan reported earlier this year, as more workers turn to mobile and IT managers look to do more with less, technologies such as unified communications (UC) will only become more popular.

Supporting this view, computer firm Technisource predicted that increased mobility will be one of the four new trends in IT that will lead to firms using more forms of UC. According to Shane O’Neill of Networkworld.com, bandwidth becomes integral to ensuring that firms continue to use these forms of money-saving technology. O’Neill anticipates that organizations of all sizes will increase bandwidth in 2011 and 2012 to support growing multimedia within the corporate network. O’Neill specifically mentions telepresence, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), distributed storage networks and Web meetings as the main technologies driving the growing bandwidth needs in organizations.

A few short months later, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), an industry analyst firm, is confirming this prediction that the awareness of unified communication and collaboration, such as conference calls, has significantly grown. In the analyst firm’s survey, “Investment Decisions in Communications and Collaboration Products and Services among Decision-Makers in Europe,” C-level executives were recognized for using four to five tools on average per day, most of which were employed at all levels of the organization. Plain and simple, with satisfying return on investment (ROI) and anticipated cost savings, companies plan to increase their spending on collaboration while market competition in the provision of these UC solutions is expected to also rise.

"The C-level executives are conscious about benefits that communications and collaboration tools can bring and 46 percent of the respondents plan to increase the budget for these tools in the next 12 months," stated Dorota Oviedo, Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst for Unified Communication and Collaboration group and co-author of the survey.

While geographic boundaries once posed a major barrier for many companies to complete business transactions, it’s no longer an issue, thanks to the growth of UC and collaboration, such as conference call services.