BYOD Down, Cloud UC Way Up in 2016

The hype surrounding the cloud and its impact on a wide variety of industries may very well be exhausting to some. After all, it seems that every other week there’s a new report predicting huge cloud growth in the near future, but this is the case for a reason: the cloud is here to stay and this may be more true for the unified communications (UC) space than many others—at least, it will be within a year’s time, if the results of a recent survey by The Redshift Research and Azzurri Communications proves accurate.

According to the survey, the enterprise communications space will make a major shift toward the cloud in 2016, with primary areas of transformation including mobility models, telephony set-ups and dependence on collaboration tools. Overall, the share of cloud in UC is expected to surge ahead from six percent in 2015 to 28 percent in 2016—a 466 percent increase.

Meanwhile, overall use of enterprise collaboration tools is expected to rise 41 percent in the year ahead as organizations boost investment in the category. While every segment in the category should see a “large increase in deployment,” the fastest growing will include phone-based conferencing services, enterprise social networking and presence, and IM tools.

This is where the report takes an interesting turn. Another popular talking point in recent years has been bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives in the enterprise. As recently as a year ago, BYOD and enterprise mobility were predicted to hit $266 billion by 2019.

However, it seems that BYOD is in the decline. Currently, BYOD accounts for 33 percent of UK enterprises’ mobility models, but 40 percent of companies plan to change their setup—whether due to reasons of cost, inflexibility, or IT resource drain—with only 12 percent of respondents planning to stick with BYOD next year.

“It is clear that there is very little support from employees for BYOD, and not much more from CIOs. In three years it has gone from ‘next big thing’ to a minority pre-occupation, with both employees and business preferring company-provided devices,” said Azzurri Communications CTO Rufus Grig. “We suspect that among the many reasons for this, employees wanting to focus on work-life balance and increasing allegiance to specific smartphone brands coupled with enterprise CIOs’ frustrations with the drain on their IT team’s time and the cost of supporting multiple platforms means that BYOD will become a marginal operating model for mobile devices in the enterprise.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle