Top IT & Collaboration Drivers
Enterprises are investing in IT, Communication, and Collaboration initiatives for a wide array of cost, productivity, adoption, and complexity issues. These drivers vary from SMB to enterprise organizations.
According to an IDC survey, enterprises are investing in IT, communications, and collaboration to:
- Improve business processes
- Cost savings/reduction
- Increase employee productivity
- Encourage collaboration internally as well as externally with customers, partners, and suppliers
- Reduce complexity/simplify delivery and management of solutions
The number one driver of network and IT investments by US based enterprises is internal business process optimization. Other top drivers are cost savings from reducing capex and opex spending and improving employee productivity (Figure 1). The results vary by size of business; specifically, SMBs (businesses with 5-999 employees) ranked increasing employee productivity higher than reducing costs, whereas large enterprises (1,000 or more employees) stated that cost reduction is more important than increasing productivity.
Top technology initiatives include WAN/network security and improving business application performance on the WAN. One-fourth of respondents (28.5%) also ranked implementing or expanding the use of cloud services as a key initiative (Figure 2). Although deploying UC/collaboration capabilities ranked near the bottom, this is not surprising given the complexity associated with implementing UC&C. Additionally, in many instances full UC&C capabilities are initially deployed on an individual use case or business unit basis before being deployed enterprise-wide.
Enterprises are migrating from static legacy services to new IP-based communications solutions at an increasingly rapid rate. Corporate use of audio, Web and videoconferencing solutions as well as UC&C platforms encompassing document sharing, messaging, and presence capabilities is growing steadily — one-third of US enterprises use UC and additional 54% plan to use UC in the future. Videoconferencing usage is even greater with 44% of enterprises reporting they use videoconferencing (see Figure 3).
The main drivers of enterprise investments in UC&C and videoconferencing solutions include reducing costs, increasing employee productivity, simplifying the delivery and management of communications, and encouraging collaboration (Figure 4-5).
Most enterprises rank reducing costs as the top priority and a key driver of investing in UC&C and videoconferencing solutions. In particular, enterprises are looking to reduce operational and capital expenses by moving to managed, hosted, and cloud-based UC solutions and are implementing videoconferencing as a way to trim travel expenses.