Microsoft Lync Poised to Attack Cisco's Crown Position in UCC

Microsoft Lync is ready to battle with Cisco to gain dominance in unified communications and collaboration (UCC), according to a new TechTarget survey. This will undoubtedly cause ripples in the traditional UC vendor market.

Key Vendors: Cisco and Microsoft

As Microsoft moves to the top two position in the UC vendor market, certain questions are being asked with regards to who is buying what in today's enterprise. Vendor selection can be influenced by an alteration in IT roles, and this denotes that the authority of IT managers is rising. This goes to say that the role of the traditional telecom manager is becoming less important. The utilization of Microsoft products such as Exchange, Outlook and SharePoint will be more familiar to an IT person, and it is therefore more likely they will use Microsoft Lync. A telecom manager, however, would be more likely to continue using a vendor such as Avaya (third in the survey), who is rooted firmly in the telecommunications industry.

The founder of ZK Research,  Zeus Kerravala, said: “Cisco still scored very well, and, by and large, organizations are still going to use it.” He added that it is increasingly likely that companies will decide to use Microsoft. He said: “I think Avaya has the market share to remain a strong number three, but you really have to wonder about everybody else when you combine what companies can do with Lync and the potential disruption of cloud-based services.”

Conducted in October 2012, the TechTarget survey of Unified Communications questioned 348 enterprise IT respondents on the issue of their present UC deployments, structures and schedules for investments in the future, and preferences for UC vendors. The findings of the survey show that following years of discussion regarding the rise of UC, around 22.7 percent have fully distributed access to UC over their organizations, and an additional 26.4 percent had only partly distributed UC or provided it to a specific number of employees.

According to Kerravala, the relatively-low percentage of full UC deployment is resultant of the amount of applications which continues to grow. He said: “UC is becoming more of an application platform than a bunch of products on the desktop. Workers want more functionality within the apps they already use, and that's where Microsoft will differentiate and change the way people think about UC.

Increase of UC Applications

There may be some confusion with regards to who it is that buys and maintains UC apps, and this may be evident in the survey. This could be consequential of the type of application which fits under the “unified communications and collaboration” umbrella. The lack of trained IT staff was mentioned by almost a third (32.5 percent) of respondents as hindering UC deployment.

UC consists of VoIP, presence, Web and audio conferencing, desktop and room-based video, call center services, unified messaging, mobile UC, UC-enabled applications and social networking. It was suggested in the survey that the more popular UC application was not necessarily the newest or most radical. VoIP was ranked highest at 63.2 percent most popular, and this is followed by audio conferencing at 59.7 percent and Web conferencing at 45.4 percent.

Besides the more traditional applications, there is debate over whether newer unified communication applications are part of the UCC umbrella. For instance, 30 percent of respondents would not call social media a UC application, and 50 percent have distributed and plan to offer social media applications in spite of this.

Advantages and Disadvantages of UC Deployments

Collaboration applications express the desire to improve team productivity, and respondents in the survey noted that collaboration between corporations had a big benefit of UC (57.5 percent), with better time to information (56 percent) and lower costs of communication (55.5 percent). A decrease in travel time, once thought to be a key reason for video conferencing, particularly during times of economic instability, was at 47.1 percent, in seventh place.

Many options are expressed by respondents as being challenges to UC deployment, the most significant of which are the low number of trained IT staff (32.5 percent) and the unclear return on investment (27.9 percent). In a bid to combine applications in UC, it is important that there is a confidence and ease-of-use with software; this allows integration to become easier than older options for hardware-based UC. The problem lies in adding up the cost of implementation, and this was third on the list of problems (at 25 percent), followed closely by concerns with security (23.3 percent). (CY) Link