Pure IP the way to go

Fierce Enterprise Communications reports.

The study, from Siemens Enterprise Communications, also said an increasingly mobile workforce is forcing more enterprises to adopt cloud technology, and staff training and headcount issues often delay a company's migration to a unified communications platform.

The savings was one of three key points to come from the study, which surveyed more than 1 000 IT decision-makers around the globe about their communications decisions and resulted in a snapshot of a market in transition, TechWeek Europe says.

While the financial benefits of a pure IP environment were made clear, so was the reality of getting there. The vast majority of enterprises - 91% - currently have a hybrid approach in place, with IP communications running alongside a legacy PBX. This mix, according to Siemens, can help “mitigate risk and protect existing investments”.

According to eWeek, enterprises are moving towards more "distributed" mobile workforces, which is driving their adoption of cloud-based services. More specifically, Siemens found: Only 20% of endpoints dedicated to phones are now at headquarters locations; the majority - 39% - of endpoints are branch phones, or at remote locations; mobile phones represent 33% of endpoints; and one in three call centre operators now works from home.

With employees so widespread, 45% of survey respondents said cloud-based services were a part of their 2012 communications plans, while 16% already have a cloud solution in place. More than 90% of respondents named Web collaboration, UC and video-conferencing as the applications they're planning to look to the cloud for, and private cloud solutions were favoured over public cloud solutions at a rate of nearly three to one.

Finally, the third major finding was that while UC remains a priority, and the benefits of the cloud are tantalising, "skill gaps" by in-house staff are slowing things down.