File Access

The Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) solutions that are available in the market include a number of individual applications that deliver specific capabilities. One much-talked-about example is Presence Management, which enables users to manage their own accessibility and preferred mode of communication, as well as view the availability of others.

 

In our latest series of surveys conducted in partnership with IntelliCom Analytics, we are asking enterprise decision makers to share their near- and mid-term plans for deploying UC applications to their employees. The current research findings focus specifically on the rollout of presence capabilities.

 

With over 2,200 responses coming in from all Global Regions, the findings strongly suggest that, overall, businesses worldwide are not expecting to aggressively expand the deployment of presence-aware applications over the next three years. In aggregate, the percentage of businesses in North America reporting that none of their employees are likely to use presence applications decreases only slightly — 4.4% — from 43.8% at the end of this year, to 39.4% by the end of 2010. Although the percentage of businesses in this “no use” category is considerably smaller in the other Global Regions — 30.2% by end-of-year 2008 and 26.7% in three years — this modest 3.5% “gain” tracks with the size of the shift seen in NA.

 

When viewed from the perspective of the number of firms that do expect to be using presence for some segment of their employees by the end of this year — 57% in North America and 70% in the other Global Regions — providers of Presence Management solutions clearly have grounds for celebration. A question remains, however, on the reasons for the small increase in firms expecting to use presence between 2008 and 2010. One possibility is that for most firms that are already using presence, the employees that actually need presence applications for their job functions will already have them by the end of 2008. While this is likely to be the case in part, we suspect that most suppliers also need to do a much better job in explaining the business benefits of presence to “enterprise holdouts.”