Infonetics 445 0 Kommentare Businesses Detail Plans to Move Unified Communications to the Cloud, Name Top Vendors

CAMPBELL, CA--(Marketwired - March 30, 2015) - Technology market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), conducted in-depth surveys with 162 medium and large organizations in North America and discovered that by 2016 over 50 percent of respondents will be running some of their unified communications (UC) applications over either a private or public cloud service.

UC integrates fragmented communication modes, such as voice, e-mail and instant messaging, into a single communication experience. Infonetics' 2015 UC Cloud and On-Premises Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey explores enterprises' plans for UC and their perceptions of UC vendors and cloud unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) providers.

"Businesses continue to migrate their unified communications applications to the cloud, citing flexibility as the key reason. Cloud solutions are inherently more flexible than premises-based solutions, offering businesses the ability to scale users up and down, centralize management, and deploy new features and applications quickly," said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS.

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS

The number-one unified communications device used by respondent businesses is the smartphone, ahead of traditional computing devices such as laptop and desktop computers
Web- and video-conferencing and text messaging are increasingly becoming part of businesses' UC communication types, reflecting changing user behavior
By early 2016, 93 percent of respondents plan to implement video conferencing into their UC solution
When choosing a unified communications supplier, enterprises surveyed ranked product reliability and technology innovation as the most important criteria
When asked about their perceptions of unified communications vendors, respondent businesses rated Cisco highest in product reliability and Microsoft highest in technology innovation
The most important criterion to survey respondents when selecting a cloud/hosted provider is security levels