During the next four years, expect some significant changes and growth in the pervasiveness of communications apps. Most notably, IT leaders plan to focus on mobile UC integration, single-vendor UC suites, and desktop video conferencing.
Such are the findings from recent Nemertes research asking 80 IT professionals about how their communications and collaboration decisions and decision-making will change between now and 2018.
One of the most significant findings is the growth in the percentage of companies relying on mobile UC integration, essentially adding UC clients to mobile devices. Today, only 9.7% of companies have such capabilities fully deployed. By 2018, nearly 60% will have them fully deployed, and 29% partially deployed (see figure below).
The growth makes sense. IT organizations have spent significant time establishing mobility strategies, connecting devices, and outlining governance policies. At the same time, they continue to upgrade TDM to IP (yep, there is still a lot of that going on) and integrate UC with other collaboration tools.
As employees become more reliant on their mobile devices to communicate, it only makes sense they would want to see call logs, work from common contact lists, and switch seamlessly between office and mobile devices. IT staffs finally are beginning to have the time to deal with UC clients -- and the clients themselves are improving.
The challenge, of course, is to make sure the appropriate security, compliance, and governance is in place. For example, will companies that allow employee-owned devices in the workplace also extend corporate UC features to those devices? Do the mobile device management tools extend to unified messaging, voice messages, or recorded conversations? Does the company have any policy for participating in a video or Web conference, or even just using a speakerphone, outside the office in a public or only semi-private location? These are just a few of the issues IT, security, legal, and HR must address.
The tasks for mobile enablement become less complex as organizations shift to a single-vendor UC suite (vs. best of breed for various apps). Today, fewer than 10% of organizations have single-vendor UC suites deployed fully; that percentage will increase to 43.5% by 2018. Another 32.3% say they will have single-vendor UC suites partially deployed (in particular global regions, within specific business units, or simply to a portion of employees with plans to extend to all). The driver? IT staffs are frustrated with integration challenges that go along with best-of-breed solutions.
Most commonly, the frustration emerges when trying to integrate Cisco and Microsoft. Coopetition simply isn't happening between the two, and many IT leaders have described conversations to Nemertes with both vendors telling them, "Pick one. We're just not going to play well together."
Ultimately, a majority of IT leaders plan to move as much of their UC suite as possible to either Cisco or Microsoft, but don't count others out. Increasingly, companies are looking for more innovative alternatives. We see them more closely examining vendors such as Avaya, ShoreTel, and Unify, for example.
As with anything in IT, change is the only constant, so that single-vendor suite could become multi-vendor as soon as the next acquisition takes place -- or until the pendulum swings back to best of breed being in vogue. With UC suites, integration may get easier, but a robust feature set may lack if the chosen vendor is slower than its competitors at product innovation. For now, anyway, the direction among IT leaders is to consolidate rather than add more vendors to the UC/collaboration equation.
The other big shift in communications deployments is with desktop video conferencing. The change here is from partial deployments to full availability to all employees who have a device on which to participate in video conferences. Today, 21% of companies have video conferencing fully deployed (whether all employees use it is another question) and by 2018, that figure will rise to 53.2%.
It’s imperative for the IT staff to explore the network demands of video and to understand how to integrate with other collaborative apps as video adoption grows.
In the next post, I'll review the findings from shared document stores and enterprise social software -- two additional collaboration areas poised for growth. In the meantime, I'd love to know whether our findings mirror what you're seeing in your enterprise. Share in the comments below!
