IP telephonyis still growing among UK
firms, but they are struggling when it comes to rolling
outunified communications.
A
survey
of senior IT managers at 100 UK firms, commissioned by comms firm
TeleWare, found that there was a high take-up of voice over IP
(VoIP), but a lack of adoption and understanding of the value of
unified communication.
Unified comms can cut costs through converged networks and
enable easier contact with colleagues through a wider choice of
contact technologies.
The survey found that almost 80% of firms have a clear VoIP
strategy, having either deployed or being in the process of
evaluating deployment, but only 5% have implemented rudimentary
unified voice and data communications systems, and only 16% have
integrated voice with another data application.
"The move to VoIP for many organisations is almost taken for
granted now," said Lesley Hansen, group marketing director at
TeleWare. "The challenge now is building the next layer of useful
services on top of a converged data and voice network, and the
survey seems to highlight the struggle UK organisations are having
with the idea of unified communications," she said.
Hansen said part of the problem lies in confusion around
interoperability.
Almost two-thirds (64%) of the companies questioned used two or
more telephony suppliers, and only a third of this sample had
definite plans to standardise on a single supplier.
Many firms considered it a moderate to major problem to
consolidate telephony services and dial plans across multiple
suppliers' telephony systems.
"Many organisations, especially at the larger end, tend to
inherit private branch exchanges from multiple suppliers because of
consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, which makes
standardisation on a single supplier trickier," Hansen said.
"There seems to be an assumption that it is difficult to
integrate telephony systems from different sources into a
consolidated telephony system, which is somewhat of a myth
propagated by hardware suppliers," she said.