The IT professionals at Evolve IP in Wayne say more and more companies are coming to believe unifying their communications and moving to the cloud will indeed put their company on Cloud 9.

The Wayne-based Cloud Services Company™ announced results of a research survey indicating that IT professionals and executives are predominately considering implementing unified communications (UC) for their organization. According to a survey of nearly 1,000 respondents, 84 percent of organizations that do not currently deploy UC features are planning for, or considering the services, for their business in the next one to three years.

The survey also found that fewer than four in 10 organizations with less than 2,000 employees are presently using any UC related features.

For this study Evolve IP defined UC as “the concept of consolidating phone, email, fax, chat, video, and collaboration into a single unified channel, either on a device or on a computer.”

The survey also discovered the most requested UC features are: audio and web conferencing, 51 percent; unified messaging, 46 percent; and IM&P instant messaging and presence, 40 percent.

The survey also showed that a majority of the businesses that have evaluated UC for their organization uncovered implementation obstacles. Nearly six in 10 respondents felt that selecting the right system was a difficult or major challenge and 55 percent felt identifying the right vendor was equally as hard.

“The problem with approaching UC as an ‘all-in’ vendor solution is the level of compromise you need to make at the organizational or user level; whether it’s an expensive forklifting of a current system or simply not getting all of the features you want, ” said Scott Kinka, chief technology officer for Evolve IP.

“We tell our customers to first define a strategy that is based on the tools and systems that your associates use today and then build a solution from there,” Kinka said. “The last thing you want to do is force a Microsoft product on a Google-based company and vice-versa. Once we have identified the strategies around an organization’s main methods of communication, and the systems that support them, we take a platform neutral approach to building the system that’s right for the customer.”

In November, 2013, Evolve conducted its blind survey of 974 IT and executive decision makers. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed were from organizations with between 50 and 1,999 employees, largely defined as mid-market. Twenty-four percent had less than 50 associates and twenty percent were enterprises with more than 2,000 employees. Evolve IP customers were excluded. The full results are here: http://pages.evolveip.net/PR2014UCBundle.html.

Currently more than 50,000 global customers depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications and contact centers. Visitwww.EvolveIP.net or http://blog.EvolveIP.net.