Unified Communications: Today, Tomorrow and Beyond

During today’s CompTIA Annual Member Meeting in Chicago, Tim Herbert, VP, market research, CompTIA, addressed our relatively new Unified Communications (UC) Community and delved into the latest study data concerning customer and service provider perspectives on the market.

CompTIA’s research looked at which UC technologies are customers using, what the customers want to do with the technologies and what is driving their decisions.  For the service providers at the meeting, Herbert also spoke on how providers can improve their prospects in the UC space.

While the definition of unified communications is still a somewhat moving target, 69 percent of customers understand UC according to service providers.  Customers are focused primarily on voice and data for UC.  Collaboration, video and social network integration will be more prevalent in about two years.

For IT service providers, the market continues to grow.  Nearly one half (49%) of customers plan to increase their UC investments greater than the relative growth of their overall IT budgets.  Price sensitivity, security and demonstrating ROI are what keep customers from signing up for UC tools and systems. Primary decision-makers remain company executives and their IT team, not necessarily the staff that is going to use the UC tools.



Pam Avila, principal and channel expert, Sierra Summit Group, and chair of the CompTIA UC Community, also addressed the group on why CompTIA is looking at UC?  What and where are the opportunities for leadership in this space?  Avila saw now as the key time for CompTIA to bring all three UC different branches together: data, telecom (voice) and video. 

Before UC those three branches had their own silos and operated very differently.  Data service providers had to support multiple vendors and learn multiple systems/products which faced continual upgrades.  The voice market has been much more constant, and vendors often only handled one or two product lines. 

Now, customers want a service provider to handle all those areas.  They don’t want to call an IT guy, a telecom guy and a video guy to handle a problem.  They want to call just one person.

How can you jump into this market?  CompTIA unveiled a number of new educational tools this week, including several that address the UC market.  Plus open up new UC industry connections by joining our UC Community.