As working and personal lives continue to merge, office workers are increasingly utilising personal electronic devices for work purposes. The introduction of tablet devices that can synchronise applications with their smartphone equivalents has also opened up new possibilities and made mobiles all the more attractive as part of a unified communications (UC) strategy.
“Organisations should be establishing their unified communications strategies now in order to prepare for new ways of working that are already on the horizon. With a UC solution in place, such shifts in working practices can be simply and securely accommodated whilst enabling the benefits of reducing costs and flexible working practices that can improve productivity and attract the best staff,” commented Graham Bevington, managing director EMEA, Mitel.
The global survey of IT professionals, conducted during a webinar that launched Mitel’s new ‘Freedom’ architecture, also showed that 90% of respondents said virtualisation will take on greater importance in their network in 2011, with over a third of these suggesting that voice virtualisation will be the most important element.
Almost 3/4 of respondents also believed that a best-of-breed network approach would achieve a stronger return on investment than being limited to a single vendor.
“Virtualisation has been a hot topic for some time, but it’s great to see virtual voice coming to the top of the agenda,” said Bevington. “We’ve always been passionate about giving organisations the freedom from a single vendor and design a communications network based on best-in-class technologies, and our new Freedom architecture was designed specifically with this in mind. Allowing organisations to tailor their own networks should be a given, and this will become ever more important as the ‘bring your own device’ trend becomes more prevalent.”