Many of today's most strategic IT leaders are looking for ways to implement a unified communications and collaboration strategy. According to a recent global survey we completed with Ovum, over half (55%) of global IT leaders plan to consolidate their communication and collaboration platforms within the next 2 years; and another 24% following within the third year. This means all their enterprise communication and collaboration services - like web conferencing, video conferencing, screen sharing, VoIP and telephony - will no longer come from separate vendors; rather one shared platform.
This consolidation of an often complex stack of communication tools brings businesses a multitude of benefits, from improved employee productivity to reduced costs to better customer service. streamlined user experience paired with a single user management system can make a huge impact on the overall efficiency of your business.
Industry research across the board is validating exactly how bright the future is UCC is - the UCC solutions market is projected to rise to $60 billion by 2025 (it was at $32 billion in 2018), according to a 2019 Global Market Insights, Inc. report. But why now? There are multitude of workplace trends are driving today's working environment that make it ripe and ready for this consolidation move.
Work Trends Fueling the Bright Future of UCC
For one, the market growth is buoyed by the growth and reliance on mobile devices, along with the continued growth of BYOD (bring your own device). Allowing employees to bring their own devices to work can save companies a lot on hardware and service costs. But a consistent challenge are the security threats posed by the use of these personal devices - which can lead to unsanctioned collaboration applications. So companies are looking to standardize on a suite of collaboration tools that not only enable efficient communication between a bevy of devices, but also meet security standards.
Secondly, as flexible work policies increasingly become the norm, communications and collaboration tools become more and more central to business success. Enabling a workforce that can work from anywhere can't be done without tools that are equally as flexible. Choosing a single vendor that can make it simple to meet each employee's unique collaboration needs will set companies up for success.
And finally, with artificial intelligence growing - nearly 3 out of 4 IT leaders have AI technology as a priority on their roadmaps - collaboration between employees becomes all the more critical. AI and cognitive technologies are helping work get done more quickly and taking the most mundane tasks of any knowledge worker off their plates. This leaves more room to get to the real "good stuff"! There's suddenly more time in the day for the most collaborative of tasks like brainstorming, ideating, planning and presenting.
The future is bright for unified communications and collaboration and it's time to build your own strategy of how to get there. reach out to us to learn how!
