Research: Unified communications and collaboration - on the up, but a way to go
The UC&C market is growing thanks to mobility and cloud but not everyone is ready for it, Computing research finds
The market for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) is "growing at an impressive pace" according to PWC, which expects it to rise at 11 per cent per annum until 2018.
There are a few reasons for this. First, UC&C ticks all the usual boxes, particularly for large enterprises: it moves capex to opex, has the potential to boost productivity, increase efficiency in terms of both management and operations and save money. It also promises softer benefits such as enabling new ways of working in a more mobile world and breaking down organisational silos.
But these benefits are not always easily realised. UC&C solutions are rarely "plug and play" and they must jostle for space on increasingly crowded networks that also accommodate traffic from mobile and cloud. A Computing survey of 130 UK IT leaders, with 85 per cent in medium-to large enterprises (500-plus staff), found that the UC&C message is being heard, but the reality of using the tools is not always living up to the hype.
The role of cloud
Seventy-nine per cent of respondents to the survey said that they were using UC&C solutions. Most popular among these were audioconferencing hardware and/or software, instant messaging and/or presence tools and videoconferencing (figure 1).
One of the key hotspots is the use of collaboration tools in the cloud. Indeed, our survey found that 61 per cent of respondents were using cloud-based social collaboration apps/platforms such as Box, Huddle, Jive, Yammer, Jabber and others. Cloud platforms enable applications to be used in real-time by employees on opposite sides of the world. They also allow for connections to be made not just between telecoms and IT (the digital merger of which constituted the first wave of UC), but also between the once discrete silos of CRM, communications and file sharing, facilitating new ways of working as well as new sources of intelligence. And, of course, much of this functionality is also accessible by smartphone.
A case in point of this blurring of the boundaries is Microsoft SharePoint, the cloud-based platform that combines content management, social networking, workflow management and other functions into one package. SharePoint was the most mentioned solution in our survey (figure 2), but it was closely followed by communications and conferencing tool Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync). Below these came online storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive and the SaaS CRM solution Salesforce.com.
One key characteristic of SaaS solutions is that they can often be deployed without the intervention of the IT department - whether this is permitted or not. Asked whether their organisation's use of the aforementioned tools was officially sanctioned as part of an overall strategy, 10 per cent said their usage was ad hoc and driven by individual users - a scenario often described as "shadow IT".
A further 28 per cent said the tools were signed off at a departmental level, a frequently cited case being the marketing department authorising a Salesforce.com subscription. This is all well and good until it comes to identifying who is responsible if things go wobbly, such as sensitive data getting into the wrong hands or issues of poor performance. Twenty-three per cent of the IT leaders surveyed said they had no idea who would be held responsible in such circumstances: the bad news is, it is very likely to be them.
A lack of clear responsibility for data breaches and performance is not the only challenge caused by the proliferation of UC&C systems. Another is their demand on network bandwidth and resources. Balancing the requirements of the various applications that use network resources concurrently can be tricky, particularly if systems have grown in an ad hoc way. Asked whether UC&C usage had been considered as part of the network strategy, one-fifth said no and a similar number did not know (figure 3 - above).
Packet loss, delay and jitter
Common problems that can result from a lack of planning and management of network traffic include packet loss and jitter, which can manifest themselves as interference on VoIP calls and glitches and delays in the streaming of videoconferencing. Applications such as these that require real-time throughput need to be prioritised dynamically over those like online storage and messaging for which small delays do not matter.
It is not just a bandwidth issue. To ensure there is sufficient networking capacity to handle both the larger data volumes caused by UC&C and the need for faster traffic, the IT department requires application-level visibility into the impact of UC&C systems on network performance - including shadow IT - and the ability to adjust traffic accordingly. This is especially true in large organisations given the prevalence of multiple wide-area carriers and peering agreements and the increased complexity that results: simply providing more bandwidth may not be enough to meet quality-of-service (QoS) service level agreements (SLAs).
Asked how they identify issues such as packet loss, jitter, delay and problems with QoS configurations, some respondents said they use network monitoring tools while others rely on their service provider or an outside consultancy. A representative sample of responses is shown in the box below.
Around half of the respondents said they must meet internal SLAs for application performance. But when large cloud vendors are part of the overall picture the service received by the business may largely be out of the IT team's control, and redress for breaching their side of the agreement may be slow in arriving - if it arrives at all. Optimising network traffic so that all applications perform at acceptible levels is not always easy.
Fast wireless, slow take-up
Nevertheless, while demands on networks may be increasing, the networks themselves are becoming faster and more resilient. Of particular relevance is the arrival of the high-throughput Wi-Fi standard IEEE 802.11ac. Approved in 2014, 802.11ac promises speeds of up to 1Gbps (Gigabits per second) across several stations, and is specifically intended to facilitate the streaming of HD video to multiple points - a capability that will be of rising importance to enterprise UC&C deployments. On the other hand, it is also likely to boost the market for UC&C still further, increasing demands on the network overall.
Despite its promise and the fact it has been on the market for more than a year, awareness of 802.11ac was surprisingly low. Twenty-three per cent had not heard of the new standard and only one-quarter of the IT leaders questioned believed that 802.11ac would have a significant impact on their adoption and usage of UC&C tools; the rest said it would make little difference.
At the start of this piece we said that the reality of UC&C does always live up to the hype. Asked whether UC&C tools are being used fully, and whether the organisation can currently reap the benefits from them, the answer to both was a heavily qualified yes: just 17 per cent answered "Yes", but a further 58 per cent answered "Yes, to some extent", with the remaining 25 per cent of respondents saying they do not feel they are reaping the benefits at all.
Anecdotally, some said that failing to achieve the expected benefits was down to lack of user education, others to poor performance and still others to the complexity of the networks and arrangements for assuring QoS.
Another answer might be summarised by "old habits die hard". The new ways of working engendered by UC&C will inevitably take a while to percolate outwards from the enthusiastic champions to the rest - often much longer than the trailblazers anticipate. Just think about how many times the replacement of email has been predicted, and yet it is still very much with us.
@_JohnLeonard