Teo Survey Highlights the Role of and Need for UC in Workplaces

With more freedom and options to communicate, the need for unified communications (UC) becomes greater. Teo, an innovative telecommunications company, made an effort to drive this point home by releasing the results of a survey on UC traction in the workplace.

The study, titled “ The State of UC Adoption Drivers in 2011”, was conducted by a market research firm and polled more than 500 professionals, mostly in middle management- to senior management-level positions across 13 industries. The study was directed at gauging the benefits they realized by using UC outside of the office.

Findings from the survey revealed that 75 percent of the respondents preferred to spend more than half their time at their desks as telecommuting options didn't seem to be effective enough, while 64 percent of respondents found the idea of using UC to work remotely rather appealing.

Additionally, 68 percent of respondents indicated that they were unaware as to whether or not their organization was using UC. Because of the ability to access all communications tools through a single interface, they presumed some sort of UC was in place.

All this highlighted not only the importance of having a UC system in place, but also of ensuring that it was being leveraged to its full potential to achieve the highest ROI.

Given a scenario where demand for smartphone-like devices is increasing, it becomes almost incumbent on companies to support their workforce with enhanced technology. However, the fact that many companies have not fully realized the power of this new generation device makes it more difficult to have a proper UC in place.

Teo advocates the use of its UC system with advanced mobile capabilities and emphasizes that the open source technology easily integrates with existing infrastructure, is scalable, flexible and easy to manage.

“With Teo, UC goes one step beyond enabling individual mobile workers to enable a true mobile workforce,” Thomas Beck, director of marketing and business development at Teo, said in a press release. “However, many companies have yet to realize the value of UC in creating a truly unified and connected mobile workforce. As companies continue to explore ways to offer their employees more flexibility and remain competitive, UC will become a must-have solution.”