Today we hear from Rob Arnold, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Communications and Dustin Kehoe Principal Analyst, Telecom Services Central Europe who recently co-authored a Current Analysis advisory report on how the unified communications views, dilemmas, and challenges differ between the large enterprise and the small-medium enterprise (SME) based on surveys and analysis of the European market. The report discusses the different levels of awareness, how buying decisions are made, deployment types, vendor selection, and makes some recommendations to unified communications users and potential users.

First, the large enterprise and SME have substantially different levels of awareness about unified communications. Not surprisingly, most large enterprises are not only aware of unified communications but nearly all have plans to deploy it, according to a 2007 EVUA survey. According to the report “while nearly 30% of SMEs [across Europe] are deploying unified communications in some form, another 30% have no plans at all (or have not even heard of the term unified communications before). They are often confused between unified messaging and unified communications and tend to take them to mean similar things.”

When making a buying decision, large enterprises “tend to see unified communications as a ‘strategic’ move towards developing new workflow patterns, improving business processes, increasing collaboration through virtual teams and reducing human latency times through applications such as IM and presence.” However, “SMEs are more tactical in their approach, . . . [they] tend to focus less on the long-term roadmap than they do on bottom line price and cost-savings . . . [and are] driven by short-term gains.”

As for deployment types, “most unified communications deployments within large enterprises . . . tend to focus around IP PBX investments” while “a typical [SME]. . . could deploy voice over broadband (e.g., cable or DSL), managed/unmanaged IP PBX, hosted IP Centrex or SIP trunking. Calendaring and e-mail capabilities could be provided by Microsoft, IBM or others; IM and presence could be provided by free services such as Skype, Yahoo or Google.”

The vendor selection approach between the large enterprise SME also differs. Since large enterprises “tend to have sizeable IT budgets, as well as ample internal resources and expertise around a number of areas, there is a tendency to go for a best-of-breed approach for unified communications.” The SME, on the other hand has limited resources so tends to pick the unified communications vendor based on value-added resellers and local suppliers. Rather than looking at one vendor as the panacea to their business challenges, they will attempt to deploy solutions from multiple vendors and trade off between managing them in-house or via a third party.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.