PRESS RELEASE — CLOUD PARTNERS — Evolve IP (an Elite Sponsor), the Cloud Services Company, today announced preliminary results of its 2015 communications survey. With 1,024 participants, the groundbreaking research revealed some keen insights into how agents in the channel should be speaking with, and talking about, cloud communications tools and features. The full survey results will be available to partners in late September.

One significant finding from the research shows that partners who are relying on standard product features as a key value to end-buyers may be missing a key driver: mobility. In fact, for those whose system doesn’t enable mobility it was cited as the second most-desired capability – slightly behind video calling. However, with 76% of organizations responding citing video capabilities already in-house, mobility enablement is the most prominent feature wanted in a new communications systems.

In addition to findings around mobility this year’s research re-confirmed the fact that despite the ongoing push of analysts, and the industry itself, end-buyers (IT professionals and executives) have little understanding of the term, or concept, of unified communications. In fact, just over 1 in 4, a slight decrease from our 2013 survey, stated they were “very familiar” with Unified Communications and 35 percent stated they were “not at all familiar” with UC. Google searches indicated similar lack of traction with 19,430 estimated average monthly searches for the UC feature “video conferencing” versus just 7,560 monthly searches for the UC term “unified communications” itself.

Other findings include:

–41 percent of cloud customers were very satisfied with mobility enablement vs. just 24 percent of premise

–3 in 10 were very satisfied with BYOD enablement vs. just 14.5 percent of premise

–4 in 10 were very satisfied with their productivity enhancements vs. 23.5 percent of premise

“This year’s communications survey clearly shows that mobility is a major driver for organizations when evaluating what they need their next communications system to enable,” says Don Mennig, Senior Vice President of Marketing of Evolve IP. “Channel partners will be very well served to make that a vital part of their conversation with end-buyers while steering clear of the broader ‘unified communications’ catch-all. Buyers are looking for real features and benefits and the term UC just hasn’t connected with them.”

One of the nation’s fastest growing cloud companies, Evolve IP provides cloud services to some of the world’s best known brands in virtually every industry including: healthcare, legal, insurance, banking, technology, travel and retail. The company’s Evolve IP OneCloud^TM solution allows organizations to migrate multiple cloud computing and cloud communications services onto a single, unified platform including: virtual data centers /servers, virtual desktops, unified communications, disaster recovery, contact centers, and more.

With its growth and success, Evolve IP and its leadership team have received numerous nationally recognized honors. These credits include: being named as a 2015 Red Herring Top 100, getting noted as “Best-of-Breed” by Gartner, its inclusion in the Inc. 500/5000 and winning numerous product awards across the company’s entire cloud services suite. For an up-to-date list of Evolve IP’s honors and awards please click here. For more information about Evolve IP please visit: www.evolveip.net

ABOUT EVOLVE IP

Evolve IP is The Cloud Services Company™. Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP’s combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today, approximately 80,000 users across the globe depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications, contact centers, and more. Visit www.EvolveIP.net or http://blog.EvolveIP.net.