Lifesize – Half of IT Pros in Dark About Collaboration & Conferencing Costs

Survey reveals businesses are collaborating, but at an unknown cost

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Published: July 28, 2017

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

Results from a recent Spiceworks survey commissioned by Lifesize, a global innovator of video conferencing technology, confirm that collaboration is essential to an organization’s strategy, but that IT professionals are in the dark about the true total cost of ownership (TCO) of these solutions. A surprising 56 percent of IT decision makers surveyed do not know how much they are spending on subscriptions and licenses for conferencing and collaboration solutions.

IT professionals are taking the path of most resistance. According to the survey, organizations, on average, are using 4.4 different solutions (web, audio, video, chat, etc.) across three different providers in an attempt to successfully meet the high demand for collaboration. Managing multiple systems not only increases the cost, but also creates other challenges for IT professionals including network limitations, service quality issues and management challenges.

The survey also found that:

  • Collaboration initiatives are highly important.
    • Nearly seven out of 10 IT professionals stated that collaboration is a high priority or even essential to the organization’s current strategy
    • Sixty-eight percent of respondents feel even more focus and attention on collaboration solutions would be valuable to end-users
  • Use of multiple solutions is wide spread.
    • Ninety-two percent of respondents have deployed or are considering using multiple collaboration solutions
    • The four most commonly used collaboration solutions are messaging (74 percent), web/screen share (72 percent), voice/audio (72 percent), and video (70 percent).
    • Sixty-six percent of IT professionals surveyed use multiple providers
  • TCO far exceeds the subscription and license fees.
    • Respondents stated that several other factors contribute to their total cost of ownership of collaboration solutions including the infrastructure to support solutions (52 percent), IT troubleshooting (49 percent), bandwidth requirements (48 percent), end-user troubleshooting (44 percent), deploying solutions (42 percent), training end-users (41 percent), and managing solutions (36 percent)
  • Cost is just one of the many collaboration challenges experienced.
    • Other top challenges include network (28 percent) and bandwidth (27 percent) limitations, dropped or disconnected conferences (26 percent), security restrictions preventing file sharing (25 percent), poor video quality (22 percent), and compatibility issues (20 percent), among others

“Due to the growing demand for workplace collaboration, IT professionals expect a reliable, secure, easy-to-use and easy-to-manage communication technology,” said Craig Malloy, Lifesize CEO.

“Managing multiple collaboration solutions from multiple vendors is complicated and chaotic and results in paying a premium for feature overlap, inconsistent experiences, slow adoption and reduced productivity. At Lifesize, we address this issue and inefficiency by consolidating a holistic suite of IT-driven and user-friendly collaboration tools – like video, web, audio, chat, recording and live streaming – into one offering.”

 

About the Survey
Lifesize commissioned Spiceworks to survey IT decision makers across the US and Canada to better understand the current state of collaboration efforts within organizations. The research specifically gathered insight about collaboration practices, tools used, total cost of ownership and associated pain points. The quantitative research surveyed 410 IT professionals in November 2016 and the qualitative research surveyed 15 IT professionals in January 2017.

About Lifesize
At Lifesize, we understand the power of connecting people to make the workplace great. For more than a decade, Lifesize has been at the forefront of video collaboration, delivering high-quality solutions designed to bring people together. We combine a best-in-class, cloud-based video conferencing experience, with award-winning, easy-to-use devices that are designed for any conference room so you can connect to anyone, anywhere. It’s a meeting experience like no other. Our video conferencing solutions are designed for the demands of today’s modern enterprise, yet fully accessible to businesses of any size.

 

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