Enterprise acceptance is on the rise and vendor commitment is growing for cloud communications.
(From our friends at No Jitter.)
We’ve been hearing for a few years now that communications will be moving into the cloud eventually, though enterprises have been reluctant to move particularly fast on this. But I’ve recently seen a few signs that suggest the pace of the migration may pick up.
Growing enterprise acceptance: Our most recent No Jitter Research survey, results of which we’ll soon publish on No Jitter, asked our audience about their adoption of cloud-hosted services. We found that companies of 1,000+ employees are well on their way to adopting cloud communications, and are even likelier than the survey base as a whole (i.e., all size enterprises) to have begun adopting cloud services. Overall, 28% of our survey respondents said they’re using cloud for PBX functions, while 30% of enterprises with 1,000+ employees are doing so. The gap is even bigger when you look at unified communications (defined in the survey as IM/presence, conferencing, voice and video calling): For the overall survey base, 34% are using cloud-based UC — while 41% of the subset with 1,000+ employees are already doing so.
Vendor push: All the vendors talk a good game about the cloud, but we’re starting to see them taking action that’s worth paying attention to. Cisco has clearly put all its weight behind Spark, not just as an application, but as a cloud-based collaboration service. Rowan Trollope, who heads Cisco’s Collaboration business unit, recently wrote this in a blog post:
“If we saw ourselves as a leading on-premises UC system manufacturer, I’m not sure we would have ever introduced Spark at all. We’d be very wary of upsetting the applecart. Instead, we see ourselves as a collaboration business. Every day we come in thinking about how we can create the right collaboration tools, rather than thinking about just a better phone or the ultimate video conferencing system.”
