Small and Medium Enterprise Business Communications in the UK

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Demand for new products and services, including unified communications

Figure 12

Regarding your business telephony, mobile and internet expenses, which of these would be the most valuable for your business?

Desire for better services

Figure 13

How valuable would you say the following could be for your business

As we have already seen, there is a significant desire for new products and services across the communications service spectrum, and this desire is explored further in the figure 13. The most valuable value-added service that might be available from a unified solution is one that automatically finds and routes calls and internet access to the lowest cost route. 'Least Cost Routing' is nothing new - early services for fixed-line telephone calls were on the market within a year of BT's privatisation in the early 1980s; clearly there is a strong desire (84% see the value in it) for a similar service now that the wider communications world is converging.

Other unified services that respondents want would allow the phone to be answered anywhere seamlessly (70%), and the ability to concentrate messages of any variety in a single mailbox (74%). In fact, more than half of SME respondents saw the value in each and every potential service that they were asked about - another strong endorsement of new service availability from a converged supply environment.

Rather like the chart above, chart 14 below shows that respondents want the features and benefits of a unified solution, but are less directly enamoured when directly questioned about unifying their needs with one supplier.

Figure 14

Which of the following might benefit your organisation?

Flexibility remains the key - essentially the ability to work anywhere, including accessing office systems when required.

This finding is confirmation of our earlier assertion that 'work from anywhere' and 'email from anywhere' are of leading importance in the communications for business field today.