SMEs moving slowly but surely to UC solutions

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 24 November 2009 09:34

IT Industry - Market

Many of Australia’s SMEs are moving slowly towards adopting a range of Unified Communications (UC) applications and are likely to consider new cloud-based offerings, while some are considering deploying IP telephony using a service provider’s hosted solution in the next two years.

In fact, Ovum says 12% of are considering deploying IP telephony which if it eventuates as predicted, “will represent almost 15 percent growth since the beginning of 2008 - albeit from a small base."

However, Ovum senior analyst in Melbourne, Claudio Castelli, cautions that there are challenges ahead for providers.

“Most companies are still using conventional PBX systems, which indicates there is still a long way to go. In addition, unlike larger enterprises, SMEs are more price-sensitive and less worried about security and controlling policies. As a result, they are more likely to adopt public VoIP services, such as Skype, instead of going to a telco.”

According to Castelli, "SMEs will also consider telcos’ cloud-based communication offerings as long as they are reasonably priced and offer some level of enterprise-grade features."

Castelli observes that it’s also interesting to see that SMEs are open to deploying software elements of UC, and he says that of the SMEs, 35 percent are using IM and 33 percent web conferencing, “with a number more expecting to use them in the future.”

Ovum predicts that the increasing adoption of different types of communication application will soon produce more integrated approaches, resulting in the unification of all those services traditionally offered as separate silos.

Castelli says that this will include offerings combining hosted telephony services with applications delivered in a SaaS model, which he says suggests that “the starting point in the SMEs’ UC journey is more likely to be a software collaboration platform than a voice platform."