Study: UC spending growth expected to outpace IT budgets overall

Spending on unified communications will grow faster than overall IT budgets in 2011 as organizations look to make their voice and data applications more diversified, adding more video, collaboration and social communications tools.

CompTIA, in a just-released report, Unified Communications and Collaboration Market Trends, said nearly half of the organizations it contacted said expenditures on UC technologies will grow relatively faster than their overall IT budget. Big companies, those with more than 500 employees, were the most likely to expand UC investments. Smaler firms came in at 35 percent.

"This likely reflects the complexity of communications at a large firm compared to a small firm," said Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTIA. "More staff, more locations, more end-points and possibly more IT systems make for a more complex communications landscape and a stronger desire to simplify through a unified communications strategy."

Among other findings:

• 31 percent of IT firms with a unified communications practice expect significant growth in their practice over the next 12 months
• 59 percent expect modest growth.
• Few expect a drop-off in their unified communications business.

The study said more companies were able to define UC, including the core areas of email, web conferencing, unified messaging, video conferencing, audio conferencing and IP communications, but social communication and location-based services have not become as accepted, according to the CompTIA study.

The study also cited several customer challenges remain as hurdles, with the largest being price sensitivity (39 percent of channel respondents); reliability concerns (36 percent); security concerns (34 percent); difficulty in quantifying return on investment (33 percent); and a general lack of understanding of unified communications products and services (32 percent).

For more:
- see this release

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