Brent Kelly and Wainhouse Research have just completed another one of their annual surveys on enterprise Unified Communications attitudes and adoption, and there's a ton of great information there, some of which Brent has put together in the form of a No Jitter Feature article. For this post, I want to call attention to Brent's findings when it comes to the lead UC vendors, as Wainhouse's respondents perceive them.
Brent Kelly and Wainhouse Research have just completed another one of their annual surveys on enterprise Unified Communications attitudes and adoption, and there's a ton of great information there, some of which Brent has put together in the form of a No Jitter Feature article. For this post, I want to call attention to Brent's findings when it comes to the lead UC vendors, as Wainhouse's respondents perceive them.First, the question of which vendors are the likeliest providers of UC clients. This one goes, hands-down, to Microsoft, whose OCS/Communicator is already used by 32% of respondents; another 37% are considering it.
Dig down to the next level and you get some interesting results. In terms of "already using," the runners-up to Microsoft are, respectively, Public IM clients (22%) and Skype (17%), ahead of IBM/Lotus (16%) and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator (11%). What this tells us is that UC is still an ad hoc, grassroots application. Even the Microsoft portion really says as much: Is anybody really running their business's communications on OCS? These are almost certainly pilots, trials, and early rollouts; a keen measure of Microsoft's head start in the market, but not a sign that they've won (yet).
When you look at who these respondents say they're "considering," the big winner is Cisco, which draws a 40% share, actually outpacing Microsoft's 37%. Notably, only 6% are considering IBM/Lotus.
Furthermore, bolstering the argument that Skype and Public IM aren't going to be the long-term answer, only 7% and 10%, respectively, are considering these two for their UC clients. Not surprisingly, 53% are "not considering" Skype, and 46% are not considering Public IM clients.
Now look at this "not considering" number for Cisco and Microsoft. Just 27% aren't considering Cisco and 13% aren't considering Microsoft, meaning the two titans have vast upside potential here. And when Brent zeroed in on the largest enterprises (10K+ employees), the picture looks even more pronounced: Almost half (42%) are already using OCS to some extent, and another 27% are considering it. Cisco's UC client is currently in use with just 13% of these enterprises, but another 35% are considering them.
Not to get back on my Cisco/PostPath hobbyhorse, but if Cisco had an Exchange-compliant email component to UPC, might that not pry open still more of this market?
