4 Factors Driving Cloud Unified Communications Adoption

It should be no surprise that as they have begun to move into management positions and make business-impacting decisions, cloud adoption is accelerating across organizations of all sizes.

UC Becoming More ‘Unified’

Unified Communications, by their very nature, should be “unified.” A simple enough concept but, one that proven incredibly difficult for vendors to execute. Conferencing, instant messaging and presence, telephony, video collaboration, desktop and file sharing, contact center it is difficult enough to integrate these UC services, let alone making sure they play nicely with popular collaboration tools such as Salesforce, Google, Dropbox, Redbooth and Concur.

Workforce productivity in the enterprise is suffering because various tools and off-the-shelf applications used by teams and workers to communicate only address niche solutions, and are disjointed from workflow processes. This often creates scattered communications (costing the U.S. economy $650 billion annually), ineffective meetings (wasting $37 billion each year in the U.S.), and fragmented workflows decreasing productivity and decision-making.

Cloud services enable employees and teams to reach new levels of productivity by integrating real-time communications and collaboration, cloud applications, and contextual intelligence, into a unified end-user experience that meets the requirements of today’s workforce.

Enterprises Ready for the Cloud

As is the case with many cloud services, early adoption tends to be in the SMB market. Small businesses seeking out technologies and tools to help them consolidate their communications infrastructure, integrate applications, and reduce the cost and complexity of their communications systems eye the cloud as the idea vehicle for those objectives.

Cloud unified communications followed a similar path, but evidence is growing that cloud UC is moving upmarket to the large enterprise. These large firms are being lured away from their current premises-based infrastructure by the superior cost, scalability, mobility and multi-site capabilities the cloud delivers. The BroadSoft global survey reaffirms the shift from premise-based UC to cloud UC is occurring across all market segments: By 2020, the survey finds cloud UC market penetration is expected to grow 3x in the large enterprise market.

Cloud and Mobile Becoming Synonymous

Another key finding from the survey is that UC and mobility are becoming synonymous. By 2020, 42 percent of those surveyed believe that more than half of UC interactions will occur on mobile devices. In fact, many organizations today, particularly European SMBs, are eliminating all desk phones, and the BroadSoft survey predicted that one-third of all SMB’s would be 100 percent mobile phone based within five years.

Cloud UC vendors report an acceleration of mobile-first deployments. It is increasingly common for users to have a major segment of their workforce not use a traditional handset at all. Their voice communications are entirely through softphones and mobile devices. In some isolated cases, the entire workforce is mobile only. Whether users choose to adopt a mobile-only deployment depends on a number of factors, including employee age, business vertical and geographic location.