Unified Communications

Only six percent of organizations’ unified communications (UC) deployments are complete, according to CDW Corporation’s first Unified Communications (News - Alert) Tracking Poll, based on a survey of 766 IT professionals who work on UC or component technologies in business, government, higher education and healthcare.

 

According to the survey, 20 percent of organizations are implementing UC, while 33 percent are planning for implementation. Seventy percent of organizations, which are currently in the UC planning and implementation stages, expect to complete their adoption within two years, despite the sluggish economy.

 

“Unified communications promises benefits that many organizations are eager to find a solution as quickly as possible,” said Ken Grimsley, vice president of strategic sales at CDW (News - Alert), in a statement.

 

Forty-one percent of responders are assessing their opportunity for UC. They say successful implementation depends on a well-conceived migration plan. The best solution addresses the readiness of the organization’s network and includes the organization’s applications that will benefit most from integration with UC.

 

UC deployments positively affect the organizational bottom line. Sixty-one percent of respondents identified increased productivity and 56 percent said operating cost reductions as the most important benefits. Other benefits, according to respondents, included more reliable communication (48 percent), improved cross-functional communication (44 percent) and more effective use of remote or mobile workers (41 percent).

 

The CDW tracking poll found that rich media conferencing strategies are emerging as a dominant approach, with 39 percent of respondents reporting their organizations are choosing that approach over telephony-centric approaches (32 percent), e-mail-centric (18 percent) and instant messaging and presence approaches (11 percent).

 

Medium to large businesses are most likely to have developed a business case or strategic plan for the adoption of UC (67 percent vs. 52 percent of respondents from other surveyed industries) and are most likely to consider UC very important to the reduction of business travel (46 percent vs. 30 percent).

 

The most challenges among organizations planning for UC deployment are network security (45 percent of responders), equipment and capital costs (44 percent) and operating costs (42 percent).

 

However, the CDW tracking poll says, with careful planning, many of those apprehensions ease once implementation begins. Organizations that have completed or begun their implementations report substantially lower levels of concern.