Who Would Benefit Most From UC?
Figure 3
shows that there is quite a difference of opinion between end user and vendor respondents when it comes to expectations about UC benefits. The vendors believe sales departments would benefit most, followed by executives and then marketing, while end users believe executives would benefit most from UC, followed by operations and project teams.
Given the fact that many (if not most) vendor sales and marketing people are not only in the business of selling UC and collaboration solutions, but they also are already receiving significant benefit from UC, it’s probably natural for them to assume that their potential customers’ sales and marketing people also would benefit. In contrast, the end users, most of whom are in IT operations, are naturally inclined to look for UC benefits for the groups that they perceive as driving their own business: executives, operations and R&D. Apparently, end users see much more value in unified communications for internally facing employees than for customer facing employees.
This is more often true in larger companies, where 50 percent of respondents expect UC to benefit operations, 40 percent expect it to benefit administration and 34 percent expect it to benefit HR. By contrast, among smaller companies the responses were 30 percent expecting a UC benefit for operations, 15 percent expecting it for admin and 11 percent expecting it for HR. In contrast, 40 percent of respondents from smaller companies believe their sales force will benefit from UC, while only 26 percent of respondents from larger companies think they will.
Perhaps larger companies see more benefit from embedding UC in internal process-related business functions than smaller companies, because the latter are less likely to be so process-intensive. Clearly, however, these data reinforce the growing industry sentiment that communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) are where the big financial and productivity gains from UC are likely to occur.
Whoever ends up with UC capabilities to do their work, it looks increasingly likely that they will be using these capabilities from a softphone rather than the traditional desk telephone.
Softphones, IM And IP-telephony
When we compared the results of this survey to our findings from 2006, we found a significant increase in the percentage of respondents who have purchased, along with their IP-telephony systems, some UC capabilities and UC-enabling add-ons that are often sold with them. Softphones purchases, for example, were included with IP-telephony system sales for 24 percent of respondents in 2006, versus a whopping 42 percent in 2007.
This big gain in softphone purchases bodes ill for telephony vendors who rely heavily on telephone handsets as a primary revenue source (which is most of them). It also makes products like Microsoft OCS, which now has softphone capability, and IBM Lotus Sametime, which is adding softphone capability, even more attractive.
If we are heading toward a future where UC client software running on a PC or laptop delivers the features and functions, either via a softphone or a simple desk phone, then this would tend to support Microsoft’s vision of the desk phone market, in which some of the phones are very simple, some have no dial pads, and others have only dial pads, but none have line appearances or feature/function buttons because all the control and the features will be done on the PC.
