Mobile UC next stop for sytems integrators

Research firm, Ovum, said, as the main drivers of enterprise mobility solutions, equipment vendors are rushing to get their products into the marketplace.

However, with a large degree of complexity in the mobile UC ecosystem, business models are still far from clear.

Furthermore, enterprises need solutions to suit their business, and economic challenges might delay plans.

Claudio Castelli, senior analyst at Ovum told CRN UC has become a key solution for system integrators (SI).

"It is clear that the future enterprise communications environment will be a complex mesh of different services mapped on to different devices chosen according to the different user needs and degrees of mobility," he said.

"The migration from legacy telephony technology to an integrated UC environment including telephony, messaging, and business process applications will normally occur in several steps.

"A multi vendor environment will initially be the norm, and system integrators are the best placed to support this transition."

Castelli said in addition to the traditional SIs other types of players will increasingly play the system integration role to drive their core offerings in the market.

"If properly deployed and embedded in the business process, UC will help enterprises to be more efficient, reduce costs and respond faster to market transitions," he said.

"In addition, with the impact of the global recession, we expect to see a growing requirement for UC as a managed service, putting less strain on CAPEX and meeting the growing pressures on IT skills and headcounts within enterprises.

However, Castelli said, some large enterprises are likely to delay significant UC integrations because of the recession.

"With restricted budgets more than ever the benefits of UC have to be proven," he said.

"CIOs want clear ROI which gives additional challenges to SIs.

"Building business cases for UC based on cost savings only is difficult."

Castelli said the real benefit of UC comes from better interaction between company employees and from closer integration of communication and collaboration in a more efficient business process.