Unified communications (UC) is beginning to be taken seriously in SA's business arena, reveals the ITWeb and Gijima Unified Communication Survey.
Almost 100% of its respondents have a positive view of UC enabling infrastructures and collaboration tools.
The survey, which attracted 180 responses, ran on ITWeb for a period of two weeks, from 1 to 15 November last year.
Gijima's business unit executive, Mike Hamilton, says the initial focus is still predominantly on infrastructure convergence, but attention is now being paid to issues beyond infrastructure. "Voice, video and collaboration are applications that can impact actual users positively and directly.”
The demand for UC comes, not only from employees eager to use them or IT departments wanting to integrate and manage them, but executives as well, he points out.
Early risers
The survey also reveals that the majority of respondents' companies are either using or considering implementing UC enabling infrastructures. Of this group (61%), only 40% of companies have already implemented it.
Seventy one percent of respondents are either using or considering implementing collaboration tools or systems. Of those, only 52% have already implemented collaboration tools.
Hamilton advises businesses which haven't implemented UC to take cognisance of emerging technology shifts, pointing out the migration from PC to tablets and other smart mobile devices.
“This will rapidly drive the need for availability of supporting unified communication infrastructure, and impact business interactions and work styles,” he adds.
Businesses should have a fully-enabled presence management integrated with corporate systems that work with smart network service selection. “Users will bring these into organisations without them being fully prepared for the impact.”
For once, he says, user-driven demand will pressure IT services to provide value and business process engineers will have to rapidly integrate new potential ways of working.
The rising stars
What was really interesting about this survey, he says, is that partner selection for UC is shifting from networking partners to integrators; based on the fact that most of the focus is on application solutions.
The survey shows that 26% of respondents believe system or application integrators and vendors are the best positioned to advise, deploy and support UC enabling infrastructures. Only 25% of respondents believe that it is network integrators and vendors.
Respondents identified bandwidth as the biggest UC challenge in enabling infrastructures and collaboration tools as well as its systems. The survey shows availability and cost of bandwidth are the top two challenges businesses face.
The other challenge, according to Hamilton, is the traditional mindset of telephony and data teams, which inhibit adoption.
“Standards for presence aggregation and interoperability beyond messaging will restrict face-to-face collaboration between organisations, leaving full unified communications as narrow deployments for some time.”
Mike Hamilton will be one of the speakers at the ITWeb Unified Communications conference at The Forum in Bryanston on 15 March.
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