Unified comms sector could benefit, despite downturn: Report

Peter Dinham
Monday, 04 May 2009 14:51

IT Industry - Strategy

Frost & Sullivan found that the majority of CIOs and IT managers cite high costs and difficulty in justifying a return on investment (ROI) as the two biggest inhibitors to UC deployments, with almost 50 percent of decision makers stating that adoption of the technologies would be enhanced if vendors provided ROI tools and calculators. Additionally, respondents were seeking case studies of actual deployments explaining how UC applications are helping organisations to save costs and increase productivity and efficiency.

William says that 40 percent of decision makers noted that it is important for UC to be integrated to with business processes, and, he said, this belief is reflected in the emerging interest in Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP), or the automation of human communications with business applications.
 
“CEBP allows the communications and workflow aspects of a business process to be integrated with the underlying software applications that serve the business process. Linking UC applications such as presence to the business processes is witnessing good adoption from the contact centre segment.”

According to Frost & Sullivan, its survey also indicates that over 40 percent of organisations in Australia have deployed IP telephony solutions and that Australia is one of the key global markets experiencing a rapid uptake of software-based IP phones.  The survey also found that many contact centres, for example, are looking to have agents work from remote locations or home and are equipping them with IP soft phones, and that this prevalence of IP technologies is making it easier for many organisations to introduce and use UC applications.

William also says that, with over 70 percent of respondents acknowledging that their organisations allow the use of instant messaging (IM), there is a clear shift towards collaborative tools and applications, with government sector CIOs and IT managers in particular indicating that the rate of IM usage has increased tremendously over the past year.
 
However, William cautions that IM within an organisation can only succeed with senior management buy-in.
 
And, William, also says that 75 percent of organisations nominated their preference for on-premise solutions rather than hosted UC services, with concern for “loss of control” dominating this decision. William says, however, that this may change in 2009 as organisations look to save costs by deploying UC as a service.
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