Unified Communications Increases in Popularity as Enterprises Continue to Cut Costs

The term unified communications encompasses unified messaging, collaboration, instant messaging and real-time communications—all things that companies spread around the globe rely heavily upon. Now add to that mix the fact that many organizations are still attempting to recover from the negative effects caused by the economic downturn and it’s easy to see why enterprises are being forced to cut corners where possible in order to feed that capital back into their businesses and are turning to unified communications to do so.

According to a recent report published by Infonetics Research (News - Alert), the analyst firm agrees that these sluggish economic conditions are definitely leading to the upswing of unified communications, an array of solutions that can significantly reduce costs while ramping up productivity and efficiency amongst any workforce.

"Enterprises are being extremely conservative in their spending on telephony equipment, as witnessed by declining revenue during the first two quarters of 2012," according to Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP systems and IMS at Infonetics Research, a recent blog post revealed.

According to findings, while the enterprise PBX (News - Alert) phone systems space saw around $1.9 billion in profits for the second quarter, this is a reduction of approximately seven percent from the first quarter of 2012.

Looking at a year-by-year basis however, VoIP system gateways have still been implemented and the market saw an increase of around 14 percent in the second quarter of 2012. "While we still expect 2012 to eke out some growth compared to 2011, we have lowered our forecast slightly due to continued weakness primarily in EMEA and North America, where many businesses continue to push off spending in an area where existing telephony solutions still get the job done," Myers added.

Narrowing in on unified communications specifically, the study acknowledged that the UC space was actually the only industry that expanded by ramping up 2.2 percent last quarter. Video conferencing is a big element that has led the success of the unified communications, as this communication channel is continuing to be leveraged by geographically separated division of any company and serves as a way to look at the people in which they are speaking with directly.

As more firms allow their employees to work remotely, unified communications will continue to spread like wild fire. And Mukilteo, WA.-based Teo will be there to assist users in the transition, with its ever increasing spectrum of VoIP, E911, TSG-6 and ISDN offerings.

To learn more about Teo and how it can help your organization to see multiple benefits right away, click here.

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