Unified communications adoption faces hurdles in Asia Pacific: Report

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 25 March 2009 19:20

IT Industry - Deals

Adoption of unified communications solutions (UC) by companies in the Asia Pacific region is low, although China leads the region in adoption with 35% of Chinese companies having already deployed a UC solution.

The UC market in Asia Pacific is still considered to be in the very early stages of development, and even though adoption is low, a report by Springboard Research says the market is growing and companies with more than 500 employees are the leading adopters.

Springboard says the UC market in Asia Pacific faces many challenges and, according to the research firm, few organizations are aware of unified communications solutions or how their disparate communications tools or systems can be synchronised.

The findings of Springboard’s report are based on a survey of 469 CIOs, IT managers and business managers at more than 400 large and SMB enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

While China leads the region in adoption of a UC solution, organisations in Australia and India are more likely to deploy UC over the next 12 months than anywhere else in the region, according to Springboard.

“There is a definite disparity in the value of unified communications as perceived by different organisations,” according to Ravi Shekhar Pandey, research manager at Springboard.
 
“In large enterprises, the IT departments view unified communications as an evolution in convergence that organisations must adopt, while SMBs are more concerned about improving communications and finding solutions to their business problems, and therefore are paying less attention to unified communications,” Pandey added.
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