Eric Goodness

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Eric Goodness
Research VP
10 years at Gartner
21 years IT industry

Eric Goodness is a vice president in Gartner Research, where he is the agenda manager and customer lead for Managed Services in the Communications sector. His research and advisory services focus on customer and vendor outsourcing and IT services… Read Full Bio

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Unified Communications – In the Cloud or In the Closet?

by Eric Goodness  |  June 4, 2009  |  3 Comments

I’m finishing up a User Wants and Needs survey instrument to test when large companies will adopt unified communications (UC) technologies and how they will manage and support their UC:  in-house (premise-based) or managed/outsourced (premise-based) or hosted/as-a-Service.  Other data points I’ll be looking for include:

  • Reductions in capex and opex they expect to achieve through the use of 3rd party services and hosted solutions
  • Importance of FMC in the adoption of UC
  • Business model of their potential provider (e.g. NSP, outsourcer, niche hosting provider)

Please send along any ideas in terms of the type of information your company would like to glean from this report.

3 Comments »

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 David Deans   June 12, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    Eric, I’m curious how user interface design enhancements could increase UC application adoption. Even the most tech savvy users — myself included — sometimes find themselves puzzled about how to access features to complete relatively basic tasks.

    The early-adopters don’t seem to mind the UI complexity, but mainstream users are typically less tolerant of operational interfaces that are not intuitive. I think this insight would be invaluable to vendors and those who procure systems and hosted services.

    David Deans
    Business Technology Roundtable

  • 2 Matt Coffy   June 16, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    Eric, what I see is the myriad of relationships an enterprise will have to engage through the process of UC discovery and deployment. I have been blessed in taking many training seminars on FMC and what will become over time a general migration to the various platforms that will be integrated in the UC ecosystem. What I would like to see is the vendor story that gives the full account of real true success, and migration paths. Text, IM, and even Social Networks all need a path into the center ring of UC.

    Matt Coffy
    BDM
    Control Point Solutions – HCL

  • 3 John Oaks   August 21, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    many business solution providers went with VoIP open source Asterisk, company like Panterra Networks uses Asterisk. The challenge is the high expectation on the intuitive UI. With multiple open sources running for individual component of the UC, the company has hard time to solve the UI complexity to be truly an unified system.