Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of agility for business survival, reinforcing what was already a growing requirement for modern organisations.
In Mitel’s third annual European survey of 1,000+ IT decision-makers, conducted between November 2019 and January 2020, agility overtook innovation as the Number One driver for migration of communications to the cloud, cited by 35% of respondents (46% in the UK), up from 16% in 2018. Innovation slipped to second place, with 28% of votes globally.
The requirement for agility is moving not only unified communications to the cloud but also the contact centre, with 44% of decision-makers surveyed by Mitel expressing a willingness to consider migrating their contact centre to the cloud, up from 15% in 2018.
Mitel’s latest survey also reveals a growing maturity in businesses’ approach to the cloud, with a clear focus on reliability before innovation and a requirement for flexibility from suppliers.
Nearly one in three (32%) UK businesses say that feature-rich and reliable voice communications are the most important capabilities of a first-class Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) system, ahead of presence, IM and video conferencing (23%) which topped the list last year.
Decision-makers also expect contractual flexibility. For example, 46% of UK respondents want the ability to change provider quickly if the service contract is not fulfilled, with 35% prioritising contract length to avoid vendor lock-in.
