Enterprise Communications in 2011: Buyers Reveal Top PrioritiesEnterprise Communications in 2011: Buyers Reveal Top Priorities

Thirty percent of companies say they have already deployed unified communications; 28% are in process; 4% are planning/evaluating; and 18% have no plans.

Frost & Sullivan recently conducted a survey with 200 companies across the U.S. about their enterprise communications plans for 2011 and beyond. Topics include the Cloud, CaaS/Hosted UC, mobility, tablets, video, virtualization, enterprise social networking, CEBP, multi-vendor interoperability, and more.

The study is packed with great end-user data, available to clients at www.frost.com; here are some brief highlights from the results:

* Thirty percent of companies say they have already deployed unified communications; 28% are in process; 4% are planning/evaluating; and 18% have no plans.

* Less than 40% of companies have deployed IP telephony. IM and videoconferencing get the highest usage scores, with just over 50% of companies saying employees use each of those technologies.

* Approximately 50% of respondents use mobile extensions. Of those, 70% use them extensively across company; 20% mainly by senior management; 10% in parts of the organization, or limited use; all sectors plan to increase mobile extension use or maintain capacity in the next 12 months. * Roughly 60% of respondents say audio, video, web and telepresence conferencing are "very" important to the organization.

* Thirty-two percent of companies surveyed have virtualized solutions; 25% are in process; 14% are considering; 5% are planning to deploy in next 12 months; and 18% have no plans.

* Fifty-six percent claim their virtualization administrator has influence on deployment; 26% have no such employee.

* Seventy-three percent said hosted services utilization significantly or somewhat increased in past 12 months.

* Two-thirds of companies say they use social media "extensively" for business purposes.

My colleague Rob Arnold and I will be hosting a webinar on the results on Tuesday, December 14 at 2pm ET. To join us, please register here.