UC spending will continue to increase as firms drive their digital transformation strategies post-pandemic, according to the findings of European research commissioned by technology distributor Nuvias UC.

Nuvias UC’s research was conducted among over 1,500 IT decision-makers at organisations across the UK, the Benelux region, Sweden, France, Spain and Italy.

It found that the pandemic forced businesses to “change and accelerate” their digital transformation strategies to cope with a world of remote work, with expenditure on UC technologies “rocketing” to meet demands.

In the past 18 months, 67 percent of UK IT decision-makers, for instance, said their spending on UC was “more than planned for”. This was higher than the European average of 63 percent.

But there is no sign of UC spending slowing down. In fact, almost half of UK respondents (47 percent) said their predicted spending in the next 12 months is “more than previously planned for”.

For some, this trend is due to businesses “regretting their lack of investment” in UC throughout the pandemic. A quarter of UK respondents (22 percent) said not investing enough in the first place is their “biggest regret” about their digital transformation during COVID-19. This was most significant in Spain (31 percent) and least significant in Sweden (19 percent).

Moving forward, UC spending likely remains a key priority for firms as they further embrace a hybrid way of working.

UK companies (98 percent) are “confident” in their readiness to support the hybrid workforce, with a further 89 percent saying their collaboration tools had a “positive impact” on how their employees coped with the transition to remote working.

But businesses still recognise the challenges that lie ahead when it comes to communication and integration in a post-pandemic era. The adoption of hybrid ways of working requires organisations to build a flexible UC infrastructure that can simultaneously accommodate remote and in-office operations.

This requires firms to further assess their UC offering. Two-in-five European respondents (42 percent), for example, think users within their business would like better integration tools or communication tools that work easily on any device.

Over 40 percent of all respondents says UC can help improve business continuity. While firms plan to continue spending on UC, there remains a significant need for technical expertise as UC solutions become more complex.

Over half (55 percent) of UK firms turn to IT consultants for advice on their UC challenges, with Italy companies doing so the most (62 per cent), and France the least (48 percent). Half of UK organisations (50 percent) turn to IT resellers for technical expertise.

This should come as no surprise, considering 37 percent of European respondents have experienced a lack of IT/technical skills within their IT team in the last 18 months. The UK felt this more than the European average (41 percent), with Sweden and Spain feeling this the most (42 percent), and Italy the least (29 percent).

Jeremy Keefe, CEO at Nuvias UC, said: “With respondents citing technical complexity (38 percent) as one of the biggest barriers to making a unified communications deployment successful, there is a clear opportunity for IT resellers to optimise on post-pandemic demand through taking a consultancy-led approach, and establishing themselves as the technical experts on all things UC.”

 

 



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