CIO Magazine Survey on Unified Communications

If you've been on the fence about unified communications, this survey might help convince you that collaboration technology delivers advantages you can't afford to pass up. CIO Magizine conducted an exclusive survey of 413 CIO.com visitors involved in technology purchases at their organizations in July 2009.

The survey asked respondents to answer a variety of questions about the use of unified communcations, including determining factors for purchase, benefits received and future plans around use of the advanced technology.

The survey results for the 32% of respondents currently using UC include:

Benefits considered to have the greatest impact:

• Faster productivity 64%
• Faster response time and delivery of information 50%
• Reduced travel expenses 40%
• Improved customer service 31.6%

It's interesting to note that the result we hear about the most often, reduced travel expense, was in 3rd place. And the argument for Green IT was only considered a great benefit by 8.3%.

The functionality on the IT radar for the next 12 months includes:

• Cellular/Wi-Fi Integration 31.7%
• Telepresence technology 26.6%
• Desktop videoconferencing 25.4%

Given the increasing mobility and geographic disparity of project teams, those seem to be choices that will continue to increase productivity for companies who implement the advanced technology.

To see all of the results of the survey, you may download a PDF copy here.