Nemertes Impact Analysis:

IBM (NYSE:IBM), NEC (NYSE:NIPNY) and ShoreTel (NASDAQ:SHOR) announced UC offerings integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations SMB collaboration appliance. These announcements underscore growing opportunities for SMBs to leverage solutions that bundle UC into collaboration applications such as e-mail and calendaring; reducing user and administrator complexity and lowering total cost of ownership.

SMBs match the large business market in their aggressiveness of deploying emerging applications even though they typically lack the same level of dedicated IT resources. Forty-three percent of SMBs are deploying some form of UC, while another 43% are planning to implement or are piloting UC.

Impacts:

Enterprises: SMBs should investigate bundled solutions as means for taking advantage of UC while minimizing cost and complexity.

Vendors: Deliver UC solutions that integrate on both the front and end back-end of existing or planned collaboration applications

Investors: Other vendors delivering SMB-focused bundled solutions include Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) as well as SaaS vendors such as Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Verizon Business (NYSE:VZ) and privately held PanTerra Networks.

By Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications and Collaboration Research

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