Other notable UC-related increases include purchases of audio bridging (up from 20 to 27 percent), and purchases of premises-based Web conferencing (up from 10 to nearly 24 percent). In contrast, speech access to voice mail and unified messaging systems as well as enterprise presence solutions are still ranked near the bottom of our list, as shown in Figure 4.
One reason we believe enterprise presence purchases are currently so low is that presence and IM are still free from the hosted providers (AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo), and they are widely deployed. However, we expect to see a shift from these public presence/IM providers to premises-based presence/IM solutions, as companies plan their UC strategy, and as they are forced to come into compliance with increasingly stringent record-keeping and privacy regulations.
Generally speaking, and consistent with other industry analysts, we find that IP-telephony is still sparsely deployed within the organizations that have implemented it. Not surprisingly, vendors seem to have deployed more widely within their organization than have the end users, as shown in Figure 5. It is a bit surprising, however, that more than half the vendor respondents (55.2 percent) said they had deployed IP-telephony on less than half of their desktops (19.7 + 22.7 + 12.8 = 55.2). This would imply that IP-telephony deployment is either difficult, expensive, or both, even for vendor companies, and that they, too, have a long period of transition ahead of them.
Smaller companies seem to be deploying IP- telephony more completely than larger ones, as shown in Figure 6. Among smaller companies, almost 30 percent said they had deployed to 90 percent or more of their users, while 35 percent of large organizations have IP-telephony deployed to less than 1 percent of theirs. This is not surprising, as small companies have fewer IT integration and silo issues to deal with.
We consider the slow deployment of IP-telephony by the larger companies a precursor to a similarly slow deployment of UC solutions in these companies. Given that many of them will keep their hybrid deployments (some TDM, some IP PBXs) for some time to come, we also expect UC solutions that make it easier to use an existing PBX with Microsoft’s OCS, such as the GETS middleware from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, could get some traction.
Conclusion
In this article, we have attempted to provide a glimpse of what end users are thinking about unified communications. The UC market is still nascent. A lot of hype exists regarding market size and who will compete against whom. At the end of the day, it is the users who will buy and implement UC based on their needs and their perceptions of the capabilities/offerings of each vendor
E. Brent Kelly, Ph.D., is senior analyst and partner with Wainhouse Research, specializing in all aspects of unified communications and collaboration. This article is based on data from a recent survey titled, Unified Communications, Videoconferencing and Collaboration.
