Series Summary

Enterprise Conferencing/Collaboration

 

Summary of Findings

Over the past few weeks, the Sage Market Pulse has focused on Enterprise Conferencing and Collaboration trends.  Before moving on to our next topic, we have a brief summary on what we’ve observed from these survey results*:

 

Employee groups that use conferencing/collaboration solutions

According to our respondents, IT Staff (73%) and corporate executives (58%) are the employee groups that use virtual conferencing and collaboration solutions most frequently.

 

Interestingly, Product Development engineers are among the least frequent users of conferencing and collaboration solutions (28%).

• Product development teams could be a future growth area for more sophisticated conferencing/collaboration tools, and product development software application vendors are actively increasing their own product capabilities for virtual collaboration as well.

 

Selection criteria

When considering conferencing/collaboration solutions, the most common key provider selection criteria are:

• Cost/ease of expanding capacity after initial deployment (53%);
  • Implication: customers want modular, scalable conferencing solutions that don’t require massive upfront investments.
• Ability to integrate with other applications (51%);
  • The most sought-after conferencing integration is with enterprise calendaring systems (e.g., Outlook or Notes). 55% of respondents would be willing to pay a 10% premium for this particular type of integration.
  • Implication: as enterprises move towards a Unified Communications approach, the ease with which conferencing and collaboration solutions integrate with existing productivity applications is becoming increasingly important.
• Ease of training and use for end-users (49%); and
• How well the solution delivers a few key features (47%).

 

Brand Perceptions

Cisco (28%), Polycom (19%) and Microsoft (18%) were rated among the most preferred conferencing/collaboration vendors.

• Implication: Cisco has a general brand halo among IT decision-makers at US enterprises: it was also most commonly associated with “innovation” (25%) and with offering conferencing solutions that give the “best return on investment” (22%)..  

Nevertheless, Microsoft (12%) also leads the list of least preferred vendors, followed by GoToMeeting (11%) and IBM (11%).

• Implication: while some IT decision makers have negative perceptions or have had bad experiences with the Microsoft brand, most that have heard of or use Cisco products are generally satisfied.

 

Preferences for CPE-based, Managed, or Hosted conferencing solutions

• For audio and video conferencing, more than half of organizations prefer a CPE-based approach (i.e., they own the equipment, have it located on site and manage it internally).  
• For web conferencing, however, it is more common for enterprises to prefer fully hosted virtual conferencing solutions (43%).  
• Managed conferencing solutions are the less commonly preferred approaches to audio, video or web conferencing than either CPE/in-house approaches or fully hosted solutions.  
  • Less than 20% of respondents have third parties providing comprehensive management of company-owned, on-site conferencing equipment. 

 

*We surveyed 120 IT decision-makers at US-based enterprises with at least 1,000 employees