What is driving the adoption of enterprise Unified Comms?

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) has been evolving steadily since the early 1990s but today we’re in a new era of accelerated change. With more than two decades of UCC deployments the market is ready for new growth, innovation and collaboration across the value chain.

Just under 50% of enterprises around the world have deployed UCC with an additional 33% expected to start within the next three years, according to a Tata Communications’ Partner Survey 2016. That means half of enterprises haven’t experienced the benefits of UCC and seen how it can drive productivity and efficiency in a business environment.

The 33% of enterprises that will be making the move to UCC over the next three years will make this transition because the solutions and the market are changing. I see barriers to adoption being removed and simpler, more powerful solutions becoming available to an even wider range of customers. To me that will unlock the potential of UCC in more businesses and more markets around the world.

Here are the five factors that I see driving today’s enterprise adoption and reshaping the UCC market:

1. Simplify deployments – Deployment models are simpler than they have ever been. The trend away from on-premise self-managed models mean that more enterprises can access UCC and deploy it without adding complexity to their operations. On-premise managed UCC, hosted managed UCC and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) are all set to grow over the next three years, according to the Partner survey.
2.  Embracing the cloud – UCaaS is reshaping how business collaboration is deployed and managed, making it easy to adopt and scale UCC within an enterprise. It removes the friction from adopting and managing UCC and moves it from a capex to a purely opex-based model. That makes it easier for enterprises to manage costs while scaling up and down new services.

3. Create new agility with Global SIP – Global SIP is delivering scalability, reliability and the flexibility to support multi-site multinational UCC deployments. It enables enterprises to efficiently connect UCC services with consistent Quality of Service and Experience. That drives usage and enables the rapid delivery of global UCC platforms. SIP also provides a way to layer on additional services outside of the typical UCC stack – services like contact center-as-a-service can bring new levels of sophistication to customer engagement – all via SIP.

4. New Partnerships Creating Stronger Services – Across the UCC value chain partnerships are bringing different companies together to create dynamic UCC solutions. Tata Communications and West have partnered to combine a global leader in UCC with one of the world’s largest communications providers to give enterprises rapid access to UCC platforms and the connectivity and reach to deliver them. That makes it easier to adopt and deploy UCC.

5. Service Providers are Focusing on Unmet Demands – Across the UCC value chain partnerships are bringing different companies together to create dynamic UCC solutions. Tata Communications and West have partnered to combine a global leader in UCC with one of the world’s largest communications providers to give enterprises rapid access to UCC platforms and the connectivity and reach to deliver them. That makes it easier to adopt and deploy UCC.

Each of these factors makes adopting UCC simple, fast, and efficient. They ensure the success of UCC deployments while making the business case for enterprises easier to develop.

The risks and barriers are being reduced and ultimately this will be mean that the 33% of enterprises adopting UCC over the next 3 years will have access to better services with greater benefits. The market is evolving with greater speed and that will drive enterprise adoption.

Are you attending Enterprise Connect this week? Meet Tata Communications at booth 1627.