88 percent of North American enterprises plan to add video conferencing (VC) to their unified communications (UC) architecture by February 2015, underscoring the continued growth of video within enterprise UC deployments, said Infonetics Research.
The report called 2014 UC Cloud and On-Premises Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey noted that mobile device integration is rated a very important UC capability by 74 percent of respondents.
According to enterprises surveyed, the #1 factor driving cloud UC adoption is cost.
E-mail is the most common UC application deployed in the cloud (private or public) today by survey participants, followed closely by instant messaging, voice, conferencing, and collaboration.
When asked who they consider to be the top 3 suppliers for on-premises and cloud UC products and services, enterprises most often named Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM.
Qualities businesses most often look for when choosing a hosted provider include a high level of service support, QoS guarantees, and security.
The survey analyzed enterprises’ plans for unified communications (UC), including cloud deployments, and their perceptions of UC vendors.
Mobility was again a key trend running through the UC survey. More businesses are embracing BYOD and also outfitting employees with company-issued smartphones and tablets. This, in turn, is driving requirements to extend UC applications to these devices, the report said.
Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research, said: “Enterprises have a number of choices, from traditional premises-based solutions to a variety of cloud capabilities. This makes for a fragmented market for businesses to wade through, but it also provides options to best fit a wide swath of requirements.”
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