Di-Data: spending on UC will be cautious

Aungle’s comments to CRN come as Frost & Sullivan releases figures from its Australia Unified Communications Services (UC) Report 2008.

Frost & Sullivan claim the ‘relative infancy’ of the UC market and development of new applications means there is a limited number of system integrators with the depth of skills required to support fully-fledged UC deployments.

At present, some of the leading services companies dominating the UC services sector include Telstra, IBM Global Technology Services, Optus/Alphawest, HP and Dimension Data.

“We believe that the financial climate will actually drive a greater need for conferencing technologies, as organisations seek to reduce their travel budgets and also respond to environmental concerns and emission reduction targets,” said Aungle.

“Many of our customers now recognise the benefits of video conferencing solutions that are integrated with other communications platforms, to improve usability of these systems, which in turn will accelerate user take-up and return on investment,” he added.

Frost & Sullivan’s report found the Australian UC market earned an estimated $340.2 million in 2007 with hosted services such as conferencing, email and telephony accounting for 55.7 percent of revenue.

It said revenue will more than double to $785.9 million by 2014, at a compound annual growth rate of 12.7 percent between 2007 and 2014.

“Currently there are not many system integrators in Australia that have attained the prerequisite level of expertise in complex integration projects encompassing network, voice and desktop components,” said Audrey William, senior research manager, Frost & Sullivan.

“This shortage of UC skills will create significant opportunities for system integrators and service providers in the next few years.

“To capitalise on those opportunities, services organisations need to start developing the appropriate skills now.

"It's going to require investment and a commitment to training and certification over the next 12 to 18 months,” added William.

According to Aungle, many of Di-Data’s clients now have mature IP telephony environments and are looking to build on this platform by introducing ‘additional functionality’.

He claims ‘with a greater degree of standards-based integration between the Cisco and Microsoft worlds, these clients are looking to unify their desktop and telephony-based communications worlds’.

Aungle believes instant messaging, presence, integrated voicemail, audio conferencing and video are some of the applications Di-Data is seeing an increasing demand.

“There is definitely a place for hosted services or a communications as a service (CaaS) model to address the SMB market, as the availability of UC integration skills required to build these solutions is limited – there is not currently a wide selection of integrators with the depth of skills necessary across all three areas of network, voice and desktop,” added Aungle.

“In light of the financial crisis, I agree that spending on UC will be cautious, in that organisations are going to pay much closer attention to the productivity returns before implementing UC solutions,” he said.

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