Mobile Unified Communications Featured Article

Market research firm Infonetics Research has released excerpts from Unified Communication Product Features and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey, part of its Continuous Research Service “CRS” series of analyst notes and surveys on the enterprise VoIP and unified communications market.

The survey was comprised from a number of interviews Infonetics (News - Alert) conducted with North American medium and large enterprises. To list a few, Cisco was named the leading IP telephony provider while Microsoft is the leading e-mail and IM provider, with Google (News - Alert) a strong challenger.

"In our most recent survey of companies that use multi-modal communications, a stunning 96 percent plan to eventually integrate the various modes into a single unified user experience. Despite the confusion sowed by vendors who have abused the term 'unified communications,' unifying disparate modes of communication has strong appeal because it ultimately simplifies the lives of users and increases their productivity," notes Matthias Machowinski directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research (News - Alert).

The survey also included the top reasons for deploying unified communications as improving employee productivity, reducing operational costs, and executive demand. The fastest rising stars in the UC market are video, short messaging, and social networking, a testament to the changing nature of communication. Unified communications is most commonly delivered over a desktop computer today, but that is changing in favor of smaller and more portable devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones.

In October 2010, Infonetics Research also published its UC Product Features and Vendor Leadership survey, in which Infonetics interviewed purchase decision-makers at 106 US and Canadian companies with at least 100 employees that use multiple types of communication, including IP telephony/VoIP, e-mail, and instant messaging “IM”.

The medium and large enterprises were asked by Infonetics about their UC technology deployment models, expenditures, service provider selection criteria, reasons for and against UC deployments, vendors and service providers used, and which vendors they consider to be leaders in the UC market.

Stefanie Mosca is a Web editor for TMCnet. Previously she worked as a freelance copy editor for Digital Surgeons LLC. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University and a bachelor's degree in communication from the University of New Haven. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca