Picking up from our last newsletter, today we'll look further into a study about unified communications that at Steve Taylor and Joanie Wexler just completed. Their research showed that unified communications is clearly making its way into the planning fabric of traditional IT organizations. 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."

Integrating mobile communications was an important factor in moving to unified communications. Sixty-three percent of survey respondents cited “simplification in management of multiple communications devices and message inboxes” as one of the top three business critical communications needs of today followed closely by “improved integration and access for remote and mobile workers (62%) and “access to critical information from multiple locations via multiple devices” (59%).

The survey also indicated that respondents don’t see unified communications as a “bolted on” solution. Respondents overwhelmingly desired close integration with a Microsoft-based environment - with 93% rating Microsoft integration as either “important” or “very important.” Eighty-four percent believed Microsoft integration was more than compliance with open standards.

When it came to identifying deployment challenges, 45% of respondents identified insufficient budget as their primary challenge. Other challenges centered around integrating new unified communications capabilities with the existing IT environment: 38% of respondents named “proven interoperability with existing IT investments” among their top three challenges; 36% cited the “need to more fully understand security implications” of unified communications; and 33% believed the perception that the data network would need upgrades to deploy unified communications.

Unified communications applications and technologies have clearly emerged as a top priority for the enterprise. This will ultimately fulfill the need for users to work more collaboratively with their internal colleagues, who are increasingly mobile. Unified communications will help organizations address needs for capabilities such as Web collaboration, softphones, unified messaging, and conferencing, leading to the fully networked enterprise.

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.