UC Adoption Slow to Ramp Up

In a global survey on Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) conducted with TMCnet subscribers and visitors a year ago, well over half of the participants indicated that their companies had no current plans to deploy UC.  

 

Given the significant changes that have occurred in the business and economic environment, combined with an unrelenting market push by UC technology and application providers, we were interested to see how business views and plans for UC may have changed over the past 12 months.

 

Conducted in partnership with research firm IntelliCom Analytics (News - Alert), the current survey drew nearly 1,400 participants across all global regions (the 2007 survey had 940 respondents). In North America (NA), the 2008 results for all size businesses were essentially identical to those of 2007, with 65% of the decision makers indicating that their companies did not have any plans to utilize UC (compared to 66% in 2007).

 

That somewhat downbeat finding was counterbalanced by good news for the firms that were headquartered in the other Global Regions — compared to 55% of global businesses indicating “no plans for UC” in 2007, that percentage dropped 10 points to 45% a year later.

 

The other positive shift was seen in the large enterprise segment with over 1,000 employees. Here, the percentage of businesses that have already started UC deployments (or have firm UC plans) rose from 30% in 2007 to 35% in North America, and from 47% to 54% in the other Global Regions. Although UC providers will undoubtedly welcome this improvement in the high end, UC buy-in generally declines as one goes down market, and is lowest among SMBs. These findings strongly suggest that the UC vendors cannot rest in their efforts to educate businesses of all sizes on the tangible and measurable value of UC applications. The higher level of receptivity to UC outside of North America is likely tied to perceptions — particularly in EMEA and APAC — that popular mobility applications are prime examples of Unified Communications solutions.

 

The current survey also examined the attitudes toward UC of several key internal stakeholders. Perhaps the most upbeat finding in the entire survey is the degree of UC advocacy shown by Line of Business (LOB) decision makers. For both North American businesses (60%) as well as those outside of North America (72%), the LOB respondents had a far more bullish outlook for UC than their IT or Telecom management peers. This finding suggests that the UC providers are finally seeing some payback from efforts to broaden sales and marketing messages beyond traditional technology contacts to include the prospective business users of UC.