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Wainhouse Research has published a report documenting attitudes, interests and opinions of resellers and channel partners that shows strong interest in Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Telepresence.

 

The information was gleaned from the second-annual survey of conferencing and collaboration channel partners done by Wainhouse, which provides strategic guidance and insight on products and services for Real-Time Unified Communications.

 

Highlights of the online survey, filled out by 151 channel partner employees, are that while the relative interest in many product categories appears to be unchanged since October 2006, interest is much stronger in specific categories, including Telepresence (News - Alert) (+22 percent), Presence/IM (+16 percent, Telephony/PBX systems (+15 percent), and Unified Messaging (+14 percent).

 

Interest in integrating video and telephony systems is only slightly stronger than integrating collaboration solutions with Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS (83 percent interest vs. 80 percent interest), while integrating collaboration solutions with Lotus Sametime ranks lower (58 percent interest).

 

Cisco, Tandberg (News - Alert), Polycom, Microsoft, and IBM Lotus are the top-ranked suppliers on key channel program parameters, including reliability, account management, technical support, partner training, discount plans, and co-market programs.

 

The findings, along with many others on videoconferencing and collaboration, are in the full report, “Rich Media Metrics: Unified Communications and Videoconferencing Channel Partners,” which is available now at http://www.wainhouse.com/reports. The 26-page report in pdf form is $2,495.

 

The Wainhouse Research Rich Media Metrics program is a series of surveys intended to measure customer attitudes, preferences, and buying/deployment trends across a wide variety of conferencing and collaboration issues with channel partners, unified communication users, service provider customers and videoconferencing users.

 

Wainhouse Research analyzes the market trends, technologies/products, vendors, applications and related services in the Unified Communications and rich media conferencing fields. They publish a free news bulletin, whitepapers, industry reports, and product industry events, and provide related consulting services.

 

The global client base of Wainhouse includes established and new technology suppliers and service providers, as well as enterprise users of voice, video, streaming, distance education and web collaboration solutions.