The results recently returned from Information Week's 2013 State of Unified Communications (UC) survey, and the news is only marginally encouraging. Reports of stalled projects and slow updating are emerging, and the UC market is looking almost distressingly slow. But what's driving this slowdown? How can it be addressed and put some life back in the market? The survey had some light to shine on those fronts as well.
Basically, the increase in deployments and active use of UC tools showed a rise of just two percentage points from the 2012 survey, up to 38 percent of respondents. Perhaps worse, nearly a third--31 percent--of the operations that have rolled out new projects have brought them out to less than 10 percent of the overall user base.
There's a note of hope for UC in this, as a further 30 percent plan to bring out a UC project within the next 24 months, but that rate is basically the same as the previous survey. Perhaps somewhat more unexpected were some of the reasons behind the slowdown: while the soft economy and tight budgets played some part in holding back, one of the major reasons behind the slowdown was the increasing availability of similar tools geared toward not businesses, but the consumer.
Companies are, according to the survey, starting to draw comparisons between enterprise-grade UC tools and an increasing variety of tools offered at the consumer level by companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. While in the past UC was being held up against an aging PBX system or the like, today it's being held up against Google+ and the potentially upcoming Google Babble UC offering. With Facebook looking to make inroads of its own into VoIP tools and voice messaging, and Apple FaceTime still doing well, it's getting harder for companies to see why they should go the full enterprise tool route when many comparable solutions are coming available at no charge to the user.
Yet UC isn't taking the rise of the consumer threat lightly; one of the biggest potential hazards the UC world can offer in response comes from the Web-based real time communications (WebRTC) front. Still in its early stages, WebRTC offers a way to put voice and video directly into a Web browser, and several major players in UC, like Siemens, Avaya and Cisco--even Google's been seen getting into the act--are bringing out WebRTC projects to give the enterprise a lift. The major commercial vendors aren't quite so visible on this front--Microsoft is working on a similar project, likely to protect its investment in Skype, and Apple is staying comparatively mum--but many are looking to WebRTC to help unite a fractured market.
But as is the case with anything, the issue will likely be one of return on investment. Why would UC, even WebRTC, be better for the company than using low or even no-cost tools for the consumer? Are there security advantages? Efficiency improvements? What can be shown, and what can be proven, to be the kind of help that companies need that represents a better value than holding on to cash in a soft economy?
Answering these questions with UC, WebRTC or just about anything else will be just what a stalled project needs to get properly restarted and propelling a company toward success.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
