Steve Taylor (the handsome one pictured above with the beard) and Joanie Wexler (who authors the Network World Wireless Alert) just completed a study about unified communications, and their research showed that unified communications is clearly making its way into the planning fabric of traditional IT organizations. Using a Web-based survey of about 800 members of two large Nortel user groups, 58% of the respondents indicated that they were "more interested" or "substantially more interested" in deploying unified communications than they were 12 months ago.

For the survey, unified communications was defined as “presence-enabled communications that integrates telephony, desktop, and business applications to deliver a unified user experience and to streamline desktop and business processes.” Roughly 90% of the survey respondents were located in North America, and all were members of the International Nortel Networks Users Association (INNUA), the Nortel INSIGHT100 large-campus user group, or both.

The increased interest is particularly noteworthy as only 8% of the respondents described themselves as being among the first to implement new technology. Rather, 84% of the respondents were more mainstream adopters: 36% described themselves as early adopters who tended to wait “until we see the problems others have had” before implementing, while 48% described themselves as those who tend to do so once a new technology has become widely accepted. Of those respondents specifying a timeframe, 78% indicated that they already have deployed or will begin deploying unified communications within two years despite a number of challenges such as tight budgets and complex internal decision-making processes.

Survey-takers ranked being able to improve productivity and deliver enhanced customer service as the major anticipated benefits of rolling out unified communications projects. Nearly three-fourths selected “enhanced workforce productivity through accelerated communications” as one of the top three expected unified communications benefits.

Next time, we’ll look at some more details from the study. To review the entire results and analysis, please click here.

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