No big shift to the cloud for unified communications and collaboration

The 2012 IDG Enterprise Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) survey highlights the uptick in UC&C adoption and investments in the coming 3 years — specifically in enterprise organizations — demonstrating the value organizations place on technologies that enable consistent and connected communications between employees, customers and partners. Numerous triggers including social media and collaboration are contributing to the uptick in investments, however the proliferation of consumer devices is seen as the biggest trigger — 74% of enterprise organization are accelerating UC&C plans because of consumer devices.

Key findings include:

More than half of organizations (51%) are currently using a UC&C solution. Enterprise-sized organizations are leading the way with 59% currently using a UC&C solution.

A majority of organizations (90%) plan to invest in UC&C in the next 12 months, in fact, organizations currently are spending an average of $383,000 on UC&C solutions and services per year.

Two-thirds (63%) of organizations include the CIO and senior IT management in the purchase decision process for UC&C solutions.

Education (72%), manufacturing (66%) and retail/wholesale (66%) are the industries that expect to see the most growth in implementation in the next three years.

Increased productivity (61%), increased flexibility for employees (42%) and faster response time/delivery of information (39%) are the top drivers for implementing UC&C solutions. However, these drivers are weighed against the top UC&C challenges including cost (54%), integration with current infrastructure (47%) and lack of experience/skill sets (33%).

Three-quarters (74%) of enterprise organizations are accelerating their unified communications and collaboration plans because of the influx of consumer devices like smartphones and tablets, compared to 62% of small/medium-sized organizations.

Top factors considered during vendor evaluations (critical/very important) are ease of use (87%), ability to meet security requirements (82%) and low total cost of ownership (79%).

IDG Enterprise’s 2012 Unified Communications and Collaboration survey was conducted online among the audience of six IDG Enterprise brands — CIO, Computerworld, Network World, CSO, InfoWorld and ITworld, between February 14, 2012 — March 6, 2012. Results are based on 1,105 respondents.

Download the survery results now.