A poll conducted by Siemens Enterprise Communications indicates that 56 percent of United Kingdom companies prefer a managed service when deploying a unified communication system. The poll was designed to measure the current market perceptions and buying behavior, according to the company.
Managed Unified Communications (News - Alert) services allow customers to deploy the unified communications with less risks and lower costs. As the deployment of the service is managed by professionals, the companies would stand to get all the benefits of unified communications without the overheads that come along with them, according to Siemens (News - Alert). Also, companies get access to latest technologies in Unified Communications with the help of managed services.
According to Siemens, the demand for managed UC services indicates U.K.’s increasing need to implement technology in a planned way. Siemens suggests shifting capital expenditures into operating expenditures to achieve this task. Choosing a managed service also provides other benefits such as improved business continuity, no pressure on the IT team and access to skilled UC professionals.
“Organizations are rightly assessing the benefits of unified communications and the commercial proposition that a managed UC service can deliver,” said Tim Bishop, director of strategy, Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert). “They want to work with a partner that understands the technology and its benefits, who can also implement and deliver on a managed service basis.”
According to the survey, major reasons for considering UC in 2009 are increased productivity (24 percent of responses) and reduced cost (19 percent). The other reasons included enhanced customer service (15 percent) and less travel (14 percent).
Recently, the company introduced new tailored OpenScale Professional Service and Integration Solutions that, coupled with the company's OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) Application, can help companies eliminate the guesswork of integrating their UC technologies with existing business applications. These offerings build on Siemens' OpenSOA approach designed to allow for deep business process integration into virtually any existing line of business application to seamlessly provide rich communications-enabled business processes (CEBP).
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Tim Gray