Unified Communications

With the worsening global economy, smart companies are adopting every measure possible in an effort to squeeze out expenditure. Managed and hosted IT services offer a profitable way of managing networks and IT resources.

 

“Demand for managed services supporting unified communications will grow in parallel with the development of service provider offerings,” says market research agency T3i Group.

 

The prediction was based on a survey conducted on 250 U.S and international enterprises and small/medium business (SMB) decision makers. The survey also identified more than a dozen managed services as prospective near-term implementations.

 

The survey revealed that decision makers outsource services to advance employee communications, yet strive to retain secure network environments. This trend leads to the growth of managed services, according to T3i Group.

 

In the report, entitled, “InfoTrack for Enterprise Services: Managed and Hosted Services,” T3iGroup mentioned that support savings, reduced IT headcount and hardware expenditures are the major factors improving services adoption.

 

By adopting managed or hosted services, huge cash outlays resulting from legacy system ownership can be replaced with reduced monthly operating expenditures. Managed service contracts offer better capabilities to various departments, expand call center competencies and secure sensitive corporate information through managed services contracts.

 

Internet Protocol (IP) telephony applications have become the indubitable choice of IT decision makers. There are no upfront expenditures or on-premise systems required for the service.

 

One third of U.S. businesses participated in the survey consider deploying a hosted IP telephony solution for their business phones and more than half of IT decision-makers are prospective managed services customers.

 

T3i Group identified services such as unified communications (UC) applications for collaboration and conferencing, and security operations such as managed firewalls and threat monitoring among ten highly prospective near-term investments. The research also identified ten services, which reduced customer spending on support costs by more than 20 percent.

 

Recent T3i Group studies have shown that IT departments, and SMBs, in particular, are moving toward outsourced support contracts to reduce "time and materials-based" expenditures.

 

The research, which also evaluates satisfaction measurements on price, service performance and account management, found that IT decision-makers using managed services registered high satisfaction scores for managed virtual private networks (VPNs), voice and network security, conferencing and contact center applications.

 

“Now that managed services implementations are demonstrating fundamental cost savings, a trend is taking hold,” said Russell Horowitz, market research specialist at T3i Group and co-author of the report, in a statement. “We are not surprised that service adoption has increased; fewer decision-makers are less worried about the quality of off-premises solutions, and the lure of advanced communications features has driven customers to managed and hosted solutions.”

 

With global companies stressing on the economy and the green movement that usher in more telecommuting programs, T3i Group anticipates that the demand for remote connectivity, managed applications and security will further increase.