What's the Key Benefit?What's the Key Benefit?

Here's another interesting bit of research over at the bmighty site, this from an Information Week study on VOIP. Particularly noteworthy is the "Goals of Installation" chart.

Here's another interesting bit of research over at the bmighty site, this from an Information Week study on VOIP. Particularly noteworthy is the "Goals of Installation" chart.InfoWeek found that most popular reason for deploying VOIP was to "lower telecommunication costs," which almost two-thirds of the respondents cited (the survey is from June 2006, but I'd be surprised if the numbers weren't still close).

Yet when they asked about advanced applications, they found that, even a year and a half ago, the idea of unifying voice, data sharing, email and conferencing was the most powerful reason for implementing these advanced applications. In terms of the previously-cited installation goals, "one-stop communications" and collaboration both came in well behind cost savings, so the big picture here remained focused on cost.

But clearly, the UC concept has made sense from the start. We saw that when we debuted our first-ever VoiceCon UC track (actually, we called it a "conference within-a-conference") at almost exactly the same time as this survey was fielded. The sessions were packed, because Microsoft had just jumped into the field, and because the fundamental concept clearly resonated.