Unified communications is finally living up to its potential as a lucrative platform for business, with video conferencing now a realistic asset for every SME
For all the hype and investment, unified communications (UC) is only now starting to deliver the benefits it promised a decade ago, when enterprise leaders were initially sold on its transformative potential. The business case for UC is now largely agreed, and capital investment needed for UC deployment is now well within reach for SMEs as well, due to competitive cloud offerings and the wide availability of good bandwidth connections, both in the office and on the move through tablets and smartphones.
UC delivers the collaboration, which enhances decision making and teamwork, allowing organisations to become much more nimble. Important decisions in large business are not made over instant messaging, or, in this day and age, even by phone – people want group collaboration. According to Frost and Sullivan research, there were 60-70 million physical conference rooms globally in 2013, but less than five percent of these meeting rooms had video conferencing capability.
Video is coming and employees are increasingly asking for it, so SMEs are finding themselves in a position where they need to establish how they will effectively deliver it to staff on multiple levels.
