76 per cent of organisations believe cloud is the fast lane to unified comms

Better collaboration is off-premise, argues report

A majority 76 per cent of organisations believe a cloud deployment will bring "simplicity" and "accelerate business adoption" of unified communications technology.

This is according to a survey conducted by unified communications firm BroadSoft, who found that 41 per cent of 130 IT decision makers considred UC adoption in cloud "much easier", while 35 per cent found it "easier".

While BroadSoft seemed to calculate the total here as 86 per cent, the true figure of 76 per cent is still more than respectable.

The survey also picked up that most decision makers believe that 43 per cent of individual seats in customer contact centres will have cloud-based UC connections by 2020.

"This presents an enormous opportunity for service providers to add a high value component to their UcaaS offer," the survey notes.

Further, the study found that mobile integration of non-VoIP (i.e. "native") mobile device experience is also of huge importance, with a massive 89 per cent believing this to be "very important" to end users who wished to use UC in their daily work, and respondents expecting 41 per cent of firms to have achieved pick-up of this style of UC by 2020.

In fact, 55 per cent of respondents believed that non-VoIP mobile connections are "very important" to a "good end-user experience", most clearly tiring of the delicate tightrope of dropped Wi-Fi connections in the office, or muffled or broken 3G or 4G connections outside.

"Many over-the-top VoIP UC applications provide uneven communication quality and poor device UI integration," says the report.

Finally, a combined 78 per cent (37 per cent "very important" and 41 per cent "important") of respondents believed that team messaging and message-based collaboration opportunities are of great importance. However, only 51 per cent currently see a "strong potential" to provide "fully integrated" team messaging with their current UC adoption.

As Computing consistently finds, with both the stumbling of longterm industry dominators and the rise of new solutions from more generally established IT vendors, there is definite flux in the UC sector right now.

Keep checking back to the Computing UC&C Spotlight for more news and analysis on the unified communications market, as well as information about managing the increasingly complex networks on which your chosen solutions sit.