North American enterprises are adopting unified communications (UC) to improve response times, increase employee productivity, and reduce operational costs, said Market research firm Infonetics Research.
The survey called — 2013 UC Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey – says 87 percent of North American enterprises surveyed plan to add videoconferencing to their UC architecture by August 2014.
22 percent of respondents already have implemented portions of their UC architecture in a private cloud, and 19 percent have done so in a public cloud.
Collaboration is the most common application deployed in the cloud (private or public), followed by conferencing and faxing.
For businesses that have not adopted UC, the #1 barrier is cost.
According enterprises participating in this UC survey, Cisco and Microsoft are the leaders in unified communications thanks to their installed base and perceived positions of leadership.
The vendors that can effectively deliver integrated video and mobility into their UC solution and do so in a simple and easy-to-use manner will be best positioned for success.
“The biggest change we’re seeing in unified communication deployments is the adoption of video,” notes Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Businesses have been implementing more mobility into their UC architectures over the past year and now are looking toward videoconferencing to help drive further productivity.”
