Vanson Bourne is an independent specialist research-based technology marketing consultancy known for delivering research-based marketing support for the IT and telecommunications community.
The UK-based firm recently conducted research on behalf of Indianapolis-based Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert), which found that the vast majority — a full 87% — of businesses are looking to invest in unified communications technology.
Particularly strong interest in unified communications was discovered among the retail, distribution and transport sector, with a full 100 percent of respondents saying they were considering moving towards a Unified Communications (News - Alert) solution.
Results were very positive in the financial services sector as well, with 100 percent of respondents responding that they were looking to invest in Unified Communications in the near future, and 76 percent believing that Unified Communications would deliver benefits to their business.
A key takeaway from the survey points to the fact that technologies such as VoIP
and SIP are driving companies to consider unified communications solutions.
Nearly 80% of respondents to the Vanson Bourne survey cited VoIP as a technology they were planning to invest in. An additional 41% responded that interactive voice response (IVR
) piqued their interest, 31% were exploring presence management, and 30% were looking for SIP-based solutions.
According to a release announcing he study, key findings included:
- 50% of businesses said that the credit crunch would not affect their spending on Unified Communications solutions
- 58% of respondents hoped to see the greatest gain through internal return on investment, while a further 38% hoped to see both operational improvements and better service quality for their customers.
- 80% of respondents felt that offering Unified Communications rather than managing the call center as a separate aspect of the business would benefit the enterprise as a whole.
Richard Brown, VP Sales EMEA of Interactive Intelligence said, “This confirms our long held view at Interactive Intelligence that individually, technologies such as VoIP and SIP
can deliver huge benefits internally to companies by improving their operations, yet when brought together as a Unified Communications solution companies can experience both improvements in customer service and internal operations.”
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Greg Galitzine (News - Alert) is editorial director of TMCnet. To read more of Greg’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
| A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X |
| SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
SIP...more |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
| A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
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