Azzurri Communications, the managed communications provider, has identified how 2016 will be a transformative year for enterprise communications, specifically in mobility models, telephony set-ups and reliance on collaboration tools.
Working with independent market research agency, Redshift Research, Azzurri investigated how enterprises are planning to change their communications set-up in 2016. Azzurri examined the views of enterprises from a survey of 150 IT decision-makers in the UK – most of whom were from the C-suite – and also surveyed 1,000 employees who spent more than 50% of their working hours in offices.
Collaboration
As of the end of 2015, almost all enterprises have deployed at least one collaboration tool (93%) and most (69%) have deployed more than one and 29% have deployed four or more.
This prevalence is likely to grow yet further as 41% of enterprises are planning to increase their investment in collaboration tools in 2016, with every single category of collaboration tool seeing an overall boost in deployment. Specifically, phone-based conferencing services, enterprise social networking and presence and IM tools are due to enjoy the greatest rise.
“The anticipated growth in collaboration tools is a reflection of the trend for the enterprise’s need to collaborate beyond the four walls of the business itself,” concluded Grig. “More and more enterprises are seeking out the tools with which to bring together not only employees, but also partners and customers, regardless of geography, to speed up business and become more agile.”
Telephony
The corporate status quo is predominantly either IP or traditional PBX (62%), with Unified Communications (UC) slowly gaining ground - on-site deployment being the current status quo (21%).
However, 48% of enterprise IT departments are seeing 2016 as the year in which to change their telephony set-ups, and to move to UC. This is driven by high maintenance costs (55%) and frustrating inflexibility (55%). As a case in point, of those currently using traditional PBX telephony, only a third will continue to do so in 2016.
But 2016 is not only the year for UC – it is also the year for cloud. On-site UC deployments will drop by more than third in the next 12 months, while cloud-based UC deployments will soar from 6% of all UC to 28%.
“The preference for cloud deployment of UC mirrors exactly the initial motivations for telephony change – a requirement for greater flexibility and reduced costs,” comments Grig. “But in addition, it shows that while the cloud-based option hasn’t been widely available up until now, it is very much in demand now that it is. Clearly, cloud-based UC’s time has come.”
