Collaboration and conferencing are proving to be crucial to business strategy, but IT often doesn’t always know how much they cost.

That’s according to a Lifesize-commissioned Spiceworks survey, which says that 56 percent of IT decision makers are unaware of the subscription and licensing costs for their conference and collaboration tools.

The survey of 425 IT professionals found that organizations use an average of 4.4 solutions and three providers for collaboration. Lifesize says that using multiple systems increases total cost and can lead to network limitations and service quality issues. Most of the respondents (92 percent) already have multiple solutions are considering deploying them. The survey calls this “the path of most resistance.”

“Due to the growing demand for workplace collaboration, IT professionals expect a reliable, secure, easy-to-use and easy-to-manage communication technology,” Lifesize CEO Craig Malloy said. “Managing multiple collaboration solutions from multiple vendors is complicated and chaotic and results in paying a premium for feature overlap, inconsistent experiences, slow adoption and reduced productivity.”

Other factors added to collaboration costs. The infrastructure needed to support the solutions, IT troubleshooting processes and bandwidth requirements all contributed to the total cost of ownership.

In addition to cost, 28 percent of businesses reported challenges with the network when it came to collaboration. Bandwidth (27 percent) and dropped conferences (26 percent) were also issues.{ad}

Despite the cost problems, the survey noted that IT professionals and their businesses understand how important collaboration solutions are. The survey found that seven out of 10 IT professionals consider collaboration to be a major priority for their organization.

Craig Malloy spoke at the recent Channel Partners Conference & Expo. Read the Q&A Channel Partners did with him.