UK falls behind global net communications adoption
Businesses in the UK are lagging far behind their counterparts in the US, Europe and Australia when it comes to taking up unified communication (UC) technology, a new report has confirmed.
Despite the potential benefits to companies of internet-based communications, just one third of firms have so far adopted the technology across the UK, research commissioned by VAR Dimension Data revealed.
In comparison, around 60 per cent of US businesses have taken up IP telephony, with the UK ranking ahead of just Switzerland in the seven countries looked at in the study.
Commenting on the findings, Simon Welch, marketing director at IT group Horizon Technology Group, said: "People have experienced a slow service so are not confident in moving into the IP domain in the corporate environment.
"There are lots of resellers in the voice channel that don't have the skill sets to go wider than a telephony solution. They can't be expected to invest in UC.
"The distributor must deliver an integrated solution that the reseller can sell and then support them on implementation."
Despite this, the Datamonitor research also found that the take-up of VoIP is likely to increase significantly over the short-term, with two-thirds of UK businesses expected to be using the internet communications technology within the next two years. 
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