UC in the cloud: is it taking off?

08 Feb 2012

Among the many buzzwords dogging the IT industry of late, “Cloud” has been just about the loudest. For many, however, although UC’s natural home is in the cloud, it seems not to have taken off there. We examine some of the facts.

UC in the cloud hasn’t taken off as it could. That’s a pretty bald, terse statement but it sums up a great deal of the view from the Unified Communications Online LinkedIn group.

Many reasons have been offered: technical complexity of set-up, too much legacy equipment in the mid-range market, too much focus on the enterprise and not enough in the mid-range.

It’s worth fleshing out the debate with a look at some of the researched figures that have been published. This isn’t an attempt to argue with the instincts of the LinkedIn participants who have been reporting their findings; more an effort to bring some independent perspective to what they have found.

As recently as January 2012 we reported on Canalys’ prediction that VoIP would be leading the way in cloud UC implementations (see link here http://online.ucexpo.co.uk/Editorial-Analysis/Canalys-reports-importance-of-VoIP), but this is clearly a prediction rather than a reflection of what’s actually out there.

This week, however, further research has been published by Information Week in the US. It asked over 500 people in companies with more than 50 employees about their cloud infrastructure. One third were already working in a cloud infrastructure, 40% were in the planning and evaluation stages and only 27% said they wouldn’t consider it. Given that this is a technology that has been around for over half a decade it’s perhaps right to say take-up is sluggish. This is presumably why AT&T has put together a dedicated cloud communications system in the US, and similar things will no doubt be launched in Europe anytime now.

Network integration specialist Excell points out in its own summary (http://www.excellgroup.com/info-centre/excell-news/109/Unified-Communications--looking-into-2012-and-beyond/ - there’s solid research in there as well as the sales pitch) that hosted and cloud-based UC solutions only launched in 2011. Combined with the trend towards BYO computing that’s a lot of change in a short order of time so its perhaps no surprise that people haven’t rushed at it yet.

We would welcome readers’ own perspectives on whether UC is happening in the cloud as yet – and indeed whether it should.

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