Continued interest in Cloud Computing reignites Unified Communications as a Service chatter.
Market research company Gartner has predicted that 40% of businesses will adopt “a blend of Cloud and on-premise based approaches to meet their Unified Communications (UC) needs” by 2012. That compares to an estimate of between 3% and 5% in 2009.
Renewed interest in Unified Communications in a Service, taking the suite of UC applications including instant messaging and desk-based (rather than room-based) videoconferencing, is also taking place now Cloud Computing increasingly enters the mainstream business consciousness. The market analyst firm also forecasted the number of workers utilising videoconferencing from their desktops will explode from 7 million in 2008, to over 200 million by 2015.
Scott Marsden, enterprise telecoms analyst at Gartner, told BusinessCloud9: “When you move to a model using internet bandwidth, when you move to a model where you’re not holding things inside the network necessarily, it opens up the opportunity for more Cloud-like delivery. So hosted services, Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS), is an area we expected to start growing a couple of years ago, and it didn’t take off the way we expected. However in some ways, the whole Cloud discussion has restarted chatter in that area.”
“Video could certainly become part of that [UCaaS]; the critical thing is if you move to a network environment based on next-generation architecture (lots of Ethernet, lack of distance sensitivity), you get to the stage where everything end-to-end paid for as a service.”
A shift in attitude towards video by companies was also forecasted by Marsden: “The big change will be that many more organisations will recognise the importance of having video as part of their suite of communications capabilities, and will provide a mandated solution to users. This could be from the range of consumer products out there, which are increasingly looking for an enterprise home.”
“People like Skype are moving into the enterprise space, enabling that connectivity, making more of an effort to eliminate the fears people have around security issues. It could also come from the classic videoconferencing space, as they create soft clients that can be run on desktop PCs, or from the Unified Communications space.”
The recession has seen companies look to make efficiencies, though Marsden explained how some were taking more a pragmatic approach: “We’re seeing [some finance departments take] a cross-budgetary holistic view, where IT budgets are given more money to create these capabilities in spite of cuts made within the company, which is relatively new. We’ve seen it in technology companies, but also leading-edge adopters of these technologies across several sectors.”
He added: “That type of approach will become more widespread, as CFOs gain more strategic control over organisations, and get their feet more firmly under the desk at group meetings.”
Despite a renewed interest in Cloud-based Unified Communications, Marsden warned that “Most organisations aren’t ready to put their mission critical applications into the Cloud; so whilst you’re getting brand names doing something in the Cloud, the ‘something’ they’re doing is peripheral to the business.”
“That will continue to be the case for the next 24 months.”
