Unified Communications adoption has not moved far in the last couple of years according to a study by Nemertes. According to the report, there are enough challenges adopting UC to make the transition slow but it seems to be that the largest problem is that not only the hard ROI difficult to quantify, but that when the ROI is seen, it is not substantial enough to drive the business case forward. The highlights are: Internal IT Structure
So far only 10% of businesses have their IT departments structured to handle collaboration effectively, the study results say.
No hard ROI on Unified Communications
So even if they can show collaboration would save employees an hour a week, there is no guarantee that would translate into increased productivity, respondents said in interviews for the study.
Video presents bandwidth challenges
Deployments (Personal Video Conferencing) so far are limited within companies. There is no good argument that it improves productivity and IT executives worry about demand for network bandwidth if desktop video were widely adopted across their companies, Lazar says.
I have noted previously that UC business cases are like hammering Jello (Jelly), it is difficult to feel strongly about. Then when it comes up against a ton of competing budget allocations, it gets side barred. Another interesting challenge is when it requires multiple IT groups to coordinate then it also falls into a budget hole. UC will inevitably get a boost from Microsoft pushing the Exchange/Desktop people to work but I would also suspect that there will be some dissonance from the network group to initiatives from the desktop people. Such is the politics of information technology.
