Apple iOS, Android Management: Enterprises Seek Help
The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) momentum among businesses is now dovetailing with another trend – a shift towards more full implementations of unified communications (UC). A new survey from market research firm Ovum and systems integration and services provider Dimension Data shows that 78 percent of IT decision-makers now say they have both a current strategic plan and a budget for some components of a unified communications and collaboration system (UCC). More importantly, enterprises are increasingly looking towards third-party managed service providers to manage on-premise UCC solutions. Here’s a deeper look at the trends.
First, some context. Dimension Data says that one of the major focuses of the study was to understand how the rise of mobile devices was impacting UCC strategies. The study found that 40 percent of U.S. enterprises support (typically meaning providing access to corporate email) approved employee-owned smartphones and tablets while 21 percent said they support all such devices, whether vetted by the company or not.
BYOD and Unified Communications
However, there’s a disconnect. While core and newer UCC apps are generally supported on corporate-owned mobile devices, they remain unsupported on employee-owned devices. For instance, 70 percent of corporate owned devices supported instant messaging and presence while 22 percent supported it on corporate-approved and employee-owned devices and only 12 percent supported it for any employee-owned smartphone.
Other applications followed similar trends including web and video conferencing; consumer applications such as Skype, Twitter and Facebook; enterprise social software such as Yammer and WebEx Social; and cloud-based business and productivity applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and custom business applications.
UC as a Managed Service
Another important trend revealed in the study is that enterprises are seriously considering third-party managed services for premise-based UCC solutions. Specifically 51 percent of respondents said they would seriously consider a premise-based managed solution for IP telephony and 41 said they would seriously consider a managed service option for standard UC (respondents were allowed more than one choice).
The study showed that 45 percent of enterprises looked to MSPs to manage IM/presence applications and 33 percent depended on MSPs to manage 33 percent.
Dimension Data further pointed out that while public cloud UCC services are still in their infancy, U.S. decision-makers were open to the public cloud model, more so than their global peers, who tended to prefer the private cloud model.
