The Fast-growing Adoption of Unified Communications

One of the hottest emerging technology solutions in the past few years has been Unified Communications (UC). It started as a simple concept – combining your voicemail and email service into one inbox – but has grown into a game-changing technology that can reshape the way your organization collaborates, communicates, and operates. Today’s UC solutions include access to email, voice, IM and presence awareness, Web conferencing, and collaboration tools.

A recent CDW-G “Unified Communications Tracking Poll” showed that Unified Communications implementation rates have doubled year over year. Among the findings, respondents ranked increased employee productivity and reduced operating costs as the leading benefits of UC – factors that are important to all of us.

Some other key points:

• 20% of medium and large businesses say their UC solution is fully implemented, compared to 2% one year ago
• 54% of IT managers report the top benefit of UC is reduced operating costs
• 71% of organizations that have implemented UC report that UC ROI has met or exceeded their expectations
• Among health care organizations, more reliable communication is a top benefit of UC

With today’s mobile workforce, people need to access all their information from everywhere, and from all sorts of devices, causing UC adoption rates to steadily grow over the past two years. Industry analysts agree that the growth in adoption of UC will continue to grow at aggressive rates over the next two years. This growth includes customers implementing on-premise solutions, as well as those implementing cloud solutions.

According to the poll, over 75 percent of respondents indicated cloud computing enabled faster UC deployment. Why should you deploy your UC solution in the cloud?

• Easy and fast to deploy 
• No additional capital expenditure required (servers, infrastructure, etc.)
• Less up-front time designing, installing, and configuring the solution
• Sign up, install the client, and you are ready to go
• More cost effective
• Pay only for the services you need for your end users
• More flexible of a solution
• Solution scales to meet your company’s growth needs
• Customize the solution to fit your users’ needs
• Less maintenance
• No ongoing patching of the servers, infrastructure devices, etc.
• No high-end engineer hours needed to monitor and maintain the solution

If your organization is looking to implement a Unified Communications solution, check out Apptix to see what we have to offer.