Unified communications providers now offer several features across their platforms. Organizations that align with a single vendor could cut costs and simplify deployments.
IT leaders have dramatically shifted their unified communications vendor strategies in recent years, moving from…

a top-of-the-line model to aligning with a single strategic partner and its ecosystem. In this primary vendor approach, customers migrate as many UC applications as possible onto the vendor’s platform and supplement with partners to fill in any remaining holes or add additional functionality.

According to the Nemertes Research 2016-2017 Unified Communications and Collaboration Benchmark, 43% of organizations are consolidating their unified communications platforms and providers, or will do so by the end of this year.

Two factors are driving this trend. First, unified communications platforms now offer a broad feature set. By comparison, years ago, companies bought separate platforms for web conferencing, telephony, video conferencing and instant messaging (IM). But today’s UC on-premises and cloud services generally offer a broad set of features, which often include new capabilities, such as team messaging, analytics and contact center.

Secondly, IT leaders have been frustrated for years at the inability of vendors to agree on interoperable approaches for everything from instant messaging to endpoints. With a growing focus on reducing operational costs, buying from a single vendor and its ecosystem theoretically offers the opportunity to simplify the user experience, reduce deployment and operational complexity, and avoid finger-pointing when you need to troubleshoot a problem.