UC Survey: Cisco Most Reliable, Microsoft Most Innovative

By Edward Gately

By 2016, more than half of recently surveyed medium and large U.S. organizations will run at least some of their unified-communications (UC) applications over either a public or private cloud service.

That’s according to the results of a new study by technology market research firm Infonetics Research. The firm conducted in-depth surveys with 162 firms.

The study explores organizations’ plans for UC, and their perceptions of vendors and cloud UCaaS providers.

“Businesses continue to migrate their UC applications to the cloud, citing flexibility as the key reason,” said Diane Myers, Infonetics’ principal analyst for VolP, UC and IP Multimedia Subsystem. “Cloud solutions are inherently more flexible than premises-based solutions, offering businesses the ability to scale users up and down, centralize management, and deploy new features and applications quickly.”

Survey highlights include:

When quizzed on choosing a UC communications supplier, respondents ranked product reliability and technology innovation as the most important criteria. When asked about their perceptions of UC vendors, respondents rated Cisco highest in product reliability and Microsoft highest in technology innovation.

In addition, respondents said, when selecting a cloud/hosted provider, security is the most important criteria.

Organizations that participated in the survey were required to have e-mail, voice and instant messaging.