Search Results for: Communications

How to Rate Your Company’s Digital IQ

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Once upon a time you could start a business with your bare hands and rely solely on manpower to grow. Not anymore. Virtually every business today relies (more or less) on technology to stay relevant, increase awareness of its brand and sell, sell, sell.

In its 2015 Global Digital IQ Survey, consultancy firm PWC draws attention to what can be considered the 10 technological commandments for business – 10 attributes that fuel the digital growth engine of an organization

Companies Today Prefer to Outsource Communication and Collaboration

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If there’s one thing you want to hear in business, it’s a good forecast. Today, we have one such forecast to share with everyone doing business in the Unified Communications market. Grand View Research estimates that the UC segment will be a $75 billion market by 2020. A report released by the company this month takes a deeper look at the products and their application in key areas around the globe.

Grand View Research has no doubt that the global Unified Communications market is ballooning and explains why this is happening. First on the list of reasons is BYOD (bring your own device), a phenomenon that requires little explanation. Second is the emergence of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). The research found that more and more companies

5G: The Internet of Everything

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Juniper Research has released a paper that forecasts rapid adoption for the 5G wireless standard from 2025 onwards, with 240 million active connections by then. Still, this figure would account for about 3% of global mobile connections, so this does not represent the all-encompassing vision that some technology giants (like Samsung) are hoping to make a reality.

IT as a Business – ITaaB

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The annual Computerworld Forecast Study is out, revealing the IT priorities for this year in key spending areas like new technologies, and staffing up. According to the IDG-funded research, IT budgets are increasing and cloud services in particular are booming. IT is slowly but surely becoming a business in and of itself inside every company today.

With CIOs and CEOs joining forces to streamline IT decision-making, 2015 is showing growth in all areas and on all levels, according to the whitepaper. IT budgets have not only remained in place, but they’ve actually increased in 2015 by 4.3%. The spike potentially reflects a shift in IT decision making thanks to a younger generation of leaders.

Security No Longer the ‘Top Worry’ in Cloud Computing

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Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in today’s competitive landscape are often faced with making the tough decision to move operations (partially or entirely) to the cloud. This means letting go of legacy infrastructures – such as on-premises PBX phone systems – and embracing the versatility of Internet-based solutions.

For most of its existence, the cloud – particularly business-oriented cloud solutions – has been plagued by one major concern: security. It’s understandable. Keeping your data locked in a room on your site offers a sense of control. But it’s no safer than in a data center managed by experts who make it their business to secure the data. Data centers are a solid investment today, and executives are beginning to wake up and smell the roses.

Screen Size Dictates How Much Time You Spend On the Phone [Study]

A casual office chat often derails to the endless debate of which phone or computer is better. It’s understandable too. Both vendors and pixel count matter a great deal to mobile users.

Research done by Ericsson indicates that screen size heavily determines the way we employ our portables, from communications and web browsing to social networking and consuming video.

UCaaS Beats Perpetual Licensing Any Day Of The Week

Cloud-reliant software and services have enabled a paradigm shift for developers and service providers alike. Once based on the buy-once-use-forever concept, the acquisition of software and services has gravitated towards a licensing business model that has proved to be far more lucrative for every party involved, from the people who code the solution to the end users.

A recent report by Nemertes Research indicates that Unified Communications (UC) solutions, or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), are selling much better as subscription bundles, as opposed to perpetual licensing which involves a large upfront investment. And it’s hardly a surprise.

UC&C Hits Mass Adoption in North America, Vendors Now Focused On Quality

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Who says Unified Communications is slow to take off? In an analysis of the North American hosted IP telephony and UC&C services market, Frost & Sullivan reports that 2014 saw 8 million installed users, with a projection of 41.9 million users installed by 2021. That number will be mostly small and medium businesses (SMBs). Next in line will be large, distributed organizations looking to streamline their communications infrastructure and IT operations, while managing a remote workforce.

As it transitions from the early-adopter to mass-adoption stage, the North American hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services market is seeing growth rates accelerating. This is mainly due to an increase in customer awareness of cloud communications benefits. Providers are now compelled to differentiate their products through innovative features as scrutiny of service quality and reliability has increased. Vendors’ focus is gradually switching to refining their UC offerings, after successfully convincing SMBs to adopt the technology.

Fear Is The #1 Obstacle In Deploying UC&C

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Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) as a technology has unquestionable perks for productivity. In some cases, a good UC&C implementation leads to new revenue streams, a goal that sits high on every CEO’s agenda, yet many are reluctant to take the plunge. The reason itself is surprising.

Business leaders are regarded as anything but fearsome, but when it comes to investing in new technologies, many executives start to get cold feet. In a whitepaper titled Build a Better Business Case for UC, research firm Forrester offers a list of fears reported by the C-suite at 133 enterprises across the US and Europe regarding implementing UC services. Here it is below (complete with our own observations):

IT Needs to Get Off Its Butt And Start Teaching UC

Communication between a company’s IT department and the rest of the organization is often fragmented. We all accept that this is the norm because techies do one thing and everyone else does another. Sales, marketing, operations – they all basically require you to be human. IT requires you to be smart too. Which is why we applaud them for what they do. But every once in a while, the communication barrier between IT and the rest of the organization begs to be lifted.

In every company, big or small, there comes a point when the geeks need to come down from up above (or climb out of their basement) and hold a good old-fashioned training session. In the Unified Communications game, that time is now!

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