We just released the Evolve IP 2015 North American Business Communications Survey, which examined current trends around business communications and collaboration tools (known as Unified Communications or UC) with the following areas of concentration:
- Features & Adoption
- Cloud- vs. Premise-based solutions
- Video
- Mobility – Work from Home and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Enablement
The web-based survey of 1,024 North American executives and IT professionals revealed that the need for mobility and BYOD, in conjunction with cloud-based solutions, is presently the strongest driver for the adoption of business communications and collaboration tools.
Why this is interesting
Traditionally, the compelling value proposition for these features was ‘in-office’ productivity improvement and surely features like instant messaging, presence status, desktop sharing and voicemail-in-email (unified messaging) have delivered incremental time-savers that enhance end-user productivity.
However, the rapidly increasing need for IT to enable a truly mobile workforce – one that is often using their own devices – has changed the focus on how and why advanced communication and collaboration tools are implemented. Essentially, the focus on these features and benefits has shifted from increasing productivity in-office to enhancing communications and collaboration for those working out-of-the-office.
What the survey said to support this
The survey results clearly indicate that organizations that are presently using business communications and collaboration tools to enable their associates to work remotely, often with BYOD programs, are by-in-large satisfied with them. This is critical in that more than half of the organizations surveyed (51 percent) offer a Work from Home (WFH) program.
As expected, the survey indicates that cloud-based services, which tend to be newer and more feature rich, enable WFH better than older, premise systems, with 66% of organizations with cloud phone systems offering WFH programs.
The survey also informs us that 13.5 percent of organizations don’t have mobility capabilities in their existing systems, and when ranking their organizations’ satisfaction with their phone system, mobility capabilities and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) were lowest in satisfaction.
Again, when comparing satisfaction of cloud versus premise organizations, users with cloud systems were markedly more satisfied. In fact, 61.5 percent of cloud users were ‘very satisfied’ or satisfied with their mobility capabilities compared to just 44 percent of premise users and nearly 5-in-10 cloud users were ‘very satisfied’ or satisfied with their BYOD enablement vs. 28.5 percent of premise.
It appears evident from these statistics that as organizations recognize how cloud-based communications features and collaboration tools better enable mobility and BYOD, coupled with the innate ability to seamlessly add new features, organizations will continue to from premise-based telecommunications architecture and adopt cloud-based services at a faster rate.
Click here to download the full Evolve IP 2015 North American Business Communications Survey paper – it’s complimentary.
Categories: Unified Communications
About Evolve IP
Evolve IPs “Work Anywhere Office” is the only platform available that seamlessly integrates desktops, collaboration, communications (phone systems), identity and access management and contact center into a single browser-based solution that runs on any laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Services perform identically on the devices employees want to use, delivering on the promise of remote work productivity, the ability to hire the right workers anywhere, while improving employee and device security.
