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 Research’s 2015 UC Cloud and On-Premises Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey found that increasingly, businesses want to do this in a hosted fashion.
“Businesses continue to migrate their unified communications applications to the cloud, citing flexibility as the key reason,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS. “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.”
The number-one unified communications device used by respondent businesses is the smartphone, ahead of traditional computing devices such as laptop and desktop computers.
And, 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.