UC Roundup: Ribbon Communications, Evolve IP, Poly

A large number of North American companies are going to be making the jump to unified communications (UC) during the next two years and will need help on their journeys.

That’s according to key findings from the North American results of Ribbon Communications‘ UC Market Insights survey. It asked technology decision makers representing nearly 1,300 companies in North America about their UC purchasing habits and plans.

Fifty-one percent of large companies, with more than 1,000 employees, and nearly 75% of smaller companies have yet to make the investment in UC technology. Of the companies that have yet to invest in UC, nearly 64% plan to do so within the next two years.

When looking deeper into those organizations that have not yet adopted UC technology, the research found the following:

• Nearly two-thirds of large companies have a positive view of UC compared to just 32% of small companies.
• When asked what the most difficult aspect of switching to UC would be, most companies cited disruption to business, training employees on the new system and previous bad experiences with switching from old to new systems.
• Among all non-adopters, the biggest factors affecting the decision to switch to UC are price, provider, product and change event (age of system, contract ending, etc.).

Ribbon’s John Macario

John Macario, Ribbon‘s senior vice president of channel marketing, tells Channel Partners it’s likely that a variety of reasons are holding back companies from adopting UC, and some are going to be very specific to an individual company.

“Generally though, it seems many companies are hung up on a choice between an on-premises PBX versus a UCaaS solution,” he said. “Forty-two percent of large companies who have yet to adopt UC say they prefer a premise solution despite the fact that these same organizations have moved a large number of business functions to the cloud (Salesforce, Office 365, Teams, etc.). Their stated reasons for the preference are counter to what we would expect — 39% of the largest companies say they would have ‘more control’ and 23% say they would be ‘more comfortable’ with a premise system.”

Other key findings Include:

• Those organizations that have already adopted UC services purchased them from traditional providers (34%), IT services providers (13%), cable providers (13%), equipment providers (13%), over-the-top (OTT) providers (10%), mobile providers (6%), competitive providers (6%) and phone resellers (5%).
• Those companies that have yet to adopt UC services plan to purchase them from traditional providers (17%), mobile providers (16%), cable providers (13%), equipment providers (13%), IT services providers (12%), OTT providers (10%), phone resellers (10%) and competitive providers (9%).
• Sixty-two percent of respondents have been the victim of an IP-based (robocalling, DDoS, toll fraud, etc.) hack attempt.

“The channel needs to do three things,” Macario said. “First, play an educational role to help companies make the best choice possible. Second, use consultative selling techniques to support the educational process. Finally, pay attention to the stated purchase drivers. One of the top purchase drivers for companies of all sizes is getting a…