* All capabilities to all employees * All capabilities to a subset of employees * Some capabilities to select employees
It didn't surprise me that the majority of respondents--55%--chose the last-named option. This has been the conventional wisdom about UC for some time now: Not every worker needs every UC application or function.
What did surprise me was the significant size--22%--of the sample that said they'd deploy all capabilities to everyone. Almost a quarter of the enterprises in the Wainhouse survey expect to do a blanket UC rollout, in spite of the fact that they are statistically unlikely to have even completed a blanket IP telephony rollout yet. Those are some mighty forward-thinking people.
In his article analyzing the survey results, Brent Kelly of Wainhouse calls attention to the fact that, "the vendors would like organizations to roll out UC to everyone in the company," which at first suggested to me that this was more of a "mindshare" answer than one that reflects actual plans. It's easy to say you expect to deploy a technology ubiquitously, only to adjust later to the realities that you uncover when you really embark on the process--realities that may include cost, need, ROI and the like.
Except that in another of Brent's findings, at least some companies aren't bothering with those needs assessment/ROI stumbling blocks. Brent describes the "stunning results" of another section of the survey which revealed that "while only 15% of the companies have done a needs assessment and only 8% have a formal UC strategy, 20% of respondents have already selected vendors and another 26% have vendor selection underway. In addition, 22% have already done a pilot."
Brent continues: "Another interesting result is that very few companies have performed any kind of ROI analysis, and few RFPs been issued. For those that have moved forward with UC in this fashion, it appears to be done in a sort of 'Ready-Fire-Aim' fashion.
"These results indicate that UC is being implemented without a strategy and without a financial justification in a significant number of companies," Brent concludes. "Clearly, many companies anticipate gaining value from UC based on the promises found in the marketing messages by the leading vendors, and/or they just believe UC is the "next wave"--and thus implementation is inevitable."
Keep in mind, we're still talking about a small market of actual products sold: Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion and UCStrategies.com has estimated the UC market's size at just $200 million for 2007, projected to grow to just under $2.5 billion by 2012. That's a high growth rate but still a relatively small market four years from now. So it's not like enterprises are going on a wild UC spending spree.
Furthermore, it's possible to roll out UC products in a non-UC way. For example, if you purchase and deploy Unified Messaging, you're deploying a UC product. If you do this because you finally had to give in and scrap your old voice mail system, and you're using the new UM as a fancy replacement, you're probably not doing UC the way much of the industry thinks of UC today.
The "UC Way" would be to start by figuring out which of your workers were mobile (e.g., your sales force), then decide that UM would help them close sales faster, then calculate how much more revenue you'd generate with UM-enabled salespeople, and weigh that against the cost of the UM system. I'd wager that this scenario is much less common than the previous one.
To the extent that the vendors are out there trying to sell UC gear, any sale equals UC success, regardless of the buyers' larger vision or lack thereof. But if the pitch is that UC is a decision the enterprise will make as part of some larger overhaul of its communications environment--that's probably not happening, nor will it happen for awhile.
