Here at Nemertes Research we've spent the better part of the last three months interviewing approximately 100 end-user organizations about their unified communications plans, organizational strategies, and business experiences. While we're still in the process of crunching the numbers and analyzing the data, a few key trends have emerged about the impact of the economy on UC.From Strategic to Tactical Approximately half of participants in our 2008 benchmark told us they were deploying unified communications in some fashion, while roughly 36% were still in the planning stage. Most deployments focused on integration between instant messaging and voice systems for presence sharing and click-to-call functionality.
What we found this time around is much more of a focus on tactical application of unified communications applications rather than a strategic enterprise-wide UC deployment. What we are seeing get cut, put on hold, or delayed are large investments in unified communications architectures. Companies are telling us they are just having too much difficulty developing a short-term ROI to justify investment expense. Those in trials continue to find that interoperability and management concerns create additional costs that weren't part of the initial budget.
While several organizations that we spoke to are planning to roll-out a UC environment that integrates voice, video, messaging, calendaring, and conferencing into a common set of services, the majority are looking at the piece parts of UC with an eye to only deploying those applications that have a short term (less than one year) ROI. Among these companies, we saw significant interest in investing in on-premises audio and/or web conferencing bridges to reduce costs associated with usage-based hosted services. We saw strong interest in adopting SIP as a way to take advantage of SIP trunking services to reduce PSTN access charges. We also saw significant interest in unified messaging, not so much to deliver new services, but to reduce operational costs from managing large, disparate environments or to meet the need to replace end-of-life equipment.
We continue to see adoption of IP telephony, especially softphones for remote/traveling workers, but a number of companies told us that they've slowed or stopped IP phone deployments for all but new locations or locations where existing systems are obsolete. The need to rapidly cut IT budgets has left many organizations delaying wider IP telephony roll-outs.
The Age of Video Arrives We've tracked growth in adoption of all forms of video conferencing over the last few years. This year is no exception. Interest in video conferencing remains high, with many organizations justifying investment either in response to falling travel budgets, or as a way to justify travel budget reductions. We continue to see strong interest in telepresence, high definition, and desktop video to interface to other systems.
Managed Services Are Key Use of managed services for everything from architecture, to deployment, to management continues to grow. In times of tight IT budgets, organizations are often finding it cheaper to turn deployment and operational responsibilities over to MSPs that already have documented expertise, rather than spend the money to develop their own capabilities. This is especially true for video, where we see strong growth in adoption of managed services to provide both bandwidth and end-point management capabilities.
So what do these key trends mean? For enterprises, even tactical deployment requires an architecture. Make sure that whatever you are doing today is consistent with your long term vision, and can integrate with other plans, even if those plans are delayed a few years.
For service providers and vendors, look for opportunities to support tactical deployments by delivering short-term ROI for products as well as management and optimization services. Continue to focus on building out business cases that can justify wider-scale deployments of UC.
And for everyone, keep reminding yourself that they call these things business cycles for a reason.
