More than 45% of enterprises in Nigeria are planning to deploy unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions in the next three years, according to the latest research from International Data Corporation (IDC), the global IT market intelligence firm.[blockquote right=”pull-right” cite=”IDC”]Babatope adds that, “the future technological priorities of Nigerian enterprises are clear. They will increasingly focus on upgrading their existing infrastructures, expanding their network capacities, improving their data backup and recovery capabilities, strengthening their WAN/network security protocols, and enhancing the performance of applications on WAN topologies. Each of these priorities will contribute to increased adoption of UCC in the country.”[/blockquote]
IDC today announced the outcome of its ‘Unified Communications Trends and Priorities in Nigeria 2013 Survey Results’ report that expected the adoption of convergence technologies to increase over the coming years as enterprises transform their business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) models in order to exploit the opportunities offered by these solutions.
On the vendor side, IDC’s survey identified Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft as the leading vendors of UCC solutions in Nigeria.
Based on its survey results, IDC expects the uptake of UCC solutions in Nigeria to blossom over time as the substantial cost savings, simplified management, reduced latency, improved customer experience, and increased workforce productivity brought about by UCC will undoubtedly prove attractive to organizations of all sizes.
In line with this development, the local organizational practice of buying individual services such as telephony, instant messaging, audio/videoconferencing, and email from different vendors is expected to decline over the course of 2014, the reports says.
“Email applications stand out as the most used element of UCC among Nigerian enterprises,” Oluwole Babatope, a research analyst for telecommunications and media at IDC West Africa says. “However, the more advanced elements of UCC, such as conferencing applications, enterprise social software, and videoconferencing/telepresence equipment, have yet to gain traction in local enterprises due to the inadequate telecommunications infrastructure currently seen in Nigeria. Consequently, we expect the uptake of advanced UCC applications to occur over the longer term as the infrastructure required to support advanced services steadily improves in the country.”
Babatope adds that, “the future technological priorities of Nigerian enterprises are clear. They will increasingly focus on upgrading their existing infrastructures, expanding their network capacities, improving their data backup and recovery capabilities, strengthening their WAN/network security protocols, and enhancing the performance of applications on WAN topologies. Each of these priorities will contribute to increased adoption of UCC in the country.”
Overall, IDC expects the implementation of UCC solutions in Nigeria to remain on a positive growth trajectory as such applications are slowly but surely being incorporated into the business processes of Nigerian organizations.
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