UC in the News (part 21)

There seems to be a lot of info about unified communications (UC) being pumped out weekly. That could be due to the large number of companies that are depending on it - from the PBX vendors (Avaya, ShoreTel, Cisco) to the HPBX service providers (Cloud Comm Alliance members) to the CPE makers (Polycom, Yealink, Edgewater).

From a blog from Edgewater:

"Metaswitch sponsored study of the SMB market. The 850 SMB owners and decision makers surveyed reported that, to date, only about 20% of companies have adopted IP Communications. For those companies who have made the switch to IP, about 60% use Hosted PBX. About 80% of the market is still using TDM phone systems so we are really just at the beginning of the adoption curve. As service providers really begin to penetrate the SMB market, I expect our best customers to be selling 100,000 seats a month or more."

Some of the news coming out is in the form of case studies like this one on Virgin Media in CW: "Virgin Media claims to have cut its travel and expenses costs by 20% after introducing technology allowing employees to communicate and collaborate more effectively from the office or on the move." IN Enterprise deals, it is this kind of evidence that can sway the jury.

AVST presented at EDUCAUSE, the foremost community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education via technology: "A top 10 initiative at this year's conference is discussion and identification of ways for higher education institutions to develop campus IT architectures that respond to changing conditions and new opportunities. University IT personnel are challenged with mobility demands from staff and students, and they are tasked with the inevitable transition of moving select UC components to the cloud."

And of course the obligatory analyst prediction: Global Unified Communications Market Is Expected to Grow at a CAGR of 15.7% from 2012 to 2018. BAH!

This press release seems needless until you need it to prove to the next big customer that you indeed deploy UC to 500 offices.