Consumer Devices Driving Accelerated Unified Communications Adoption

A new research report just released by IDG Enterprise, reported on in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch site, contains some compelling numbers on the growing adoption of UC technologies, especially at the enterprise level. The report gathers the results of a recent survey completed by over 1,100 IT and business decision-makers, who were asked about their organizations’ current and future UC and collaboration technology adoption strategies. The findings demonstrate the high value “organizations place on technologies that enable consistent and connected communications between employees, customers and partners.” In other words: UC adoption rates are up and are only going to keep growing.

The numbers don’t lie. The survey found that 90% of respondents have scheduled UC and cloud investments in the next year, with enterprise-level IP telephony leading the technology pack at 55%. The prime accelerator of UC and collaboration adoption is the proliferation of consumer devices (handhelds and tablets) in the workplace, with 74% of enterprise organizations citing consumer devices as the prime factor, compared to 62% of small and medium-sized organizations.

Other findings include:

• 51% of organizations currently employ a UC solution
• 48% of enterprise organization consider video technology important
• 87% of respondents said that “ease of use” was critical or very important when considering a UC and cloud services provider.

The article also provides details on accessing the full IDG report.