CDW is reporting the results of an online survey it conducted of 915 IT professionals, and though there are several headline items, the thing that caught my eye was that they asked a question that several of our VoiceCon speakers address: What's your approach to Unified Communications architecture?The question asks whether you're telephony-centric, email-centric, rich media/conferecing or IM/presence-centric. The results are not encouraging for legacy voice vendors:
Note that this is also not an encouraging pair of pies for the rich media/conferencing folks, either. IM/presence and email--which I'd argue fit together as "desktop-centric"--are the big gainers. Good news for Microsoft (and IBM), and perhaps an explanation for why Cisco is moving more aggressively into email with WebEx Mail.
This whole issue of the UC architecture is one that pervades several of our VoiceCon sessions around Unified Communications, so much so that I pulled together some of the slides on this theme for a "slidecast" that walks you through a couple of the presenters' approach to this question of where you start or where you're "-centric." (BTW, when it comes to breakfast, I prefer omelets, which I guess makes me egg-centric. Hahahaha....Eesh...)
Anyway....I've embedded that slidecast at the end of this blog post, so you can check out a little bit of what Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting/UC Strategies and Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research are going to be presenting on this.
CDW did offer some bottom-line "Key Findings," but interestingly, of the 915-person survey base, these findings are based on just 38 responses of "organizations that have fully implemented UC and track the resulting ROI." Which in itself is a finding that's pretty interesting, though I wouldn't call it surprising: Just 4% of the survey respondents have fully implemented UC and track ROI, to the point that they have conclusions that can be drawn. That sounds about right to me.
Another intersting result had to do with a couple of the top concerns associated with UC adoption: Security and support. Here's the chart:
I don't take this figure to mean that anyone considers security or technical support to be any more settled as issues; the key is the text box below the figures: The top concern now is capital and operating costs. Alas, this is how it is with all technology adoption: When you're not adopting it, you worry about security and management; once you've actually got to start buying it, you worry about costs and pretend that security and support have been solved.
The survey has way more interesting results than I can get to in this blog; I just want to show the slide for the methodology and demographics, because it seems to validate that this is a pretty good survey base:
Here's the slidecast on UC Architectures at VoiceCon Orlando 2010:
