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Unified communication deployment growing

Written by admin | February 29, 2012

While only a small percentage of businesses have deployed unified communications solutions, the service is growing in popularity. Russell Bennett at Unified Communications Strategies has found that, out of about 357,000 companies, only 2.4 percent, or 8,500, have adopted a UC system. Bennett included information from about 38,000 large companies and 319,000 small businesses.

In order to gather information, Bennett used a program to cache and index SIP and XMPP traces on company networks, picking up a signal of whether or not the business utilizes UC programs. Using this method, any company who deploys UC inside an internal network would not register, nor would ones with powerful firewalls, giving the data about a 30 percent chance of error, which Bennett takes into consideration. This data gathering method is often employed by major companies like Google and Microsoft, according to the news source, for a variety of purposes.

Bennett discovered that about 5.5 percent of large companies use unified communications, while only 2 percent of smaller businesses answered similarly. However, because of there are a much greater number of small businesses in the country, UC adoption was three times that of large businesses. Also, according to the data, 33 percent of large corporation UC deployment is done by Fortune 400 companies.

One statistic that Bennett found odd was the tiny percentage of telecommunications companies that have implemented UC solutions. According to the data, telecoms made up the smallest number of both large and small business. Bennett believes this may be due to the fact that there are very small number of telecom companies in the country.

Ultimately, Bennett found that among large businesses, higher education institutions had the highest usage of UC, while of the small sector, industrial manufacturers made up almost one-quarter of unified communications deployment.

In addition to UC solutions, there are a number of cloud-based services that can provide important benefits. Services such as hosted PBX are low-cost alternatives to physical technology with lower maintenance fees, and cloud VoIP provides improved quality and increased productivity as well. By utilizing these solutions, businesses can not only lower their budgets, but increase revenue as well.