How Partners Can Help Clients Succeed With Collaboration Tools

Tell us about the some of the trends the report highlighted around today's collaboration market.

We've been hearing market hype around cloud-based collaboration. In the sub 1,000-seat [organizations], we are seeing a much quicker migration to cloud for obvious reasons: There's a much lower investment needed, and usually it's much more dynamic organizations with reduced security concerns looking at cloud. What we didn’t see is a massive move to the cloud from enterprises -- those [organizations with] over 1,000 seats. For enterprises, it's much more of a hybrid game. The private cloud is a prominent area too, and but adoption is still nowhere near where the on-premise collaboration market is today.

But what was really interesting about the study was when we asked respondents "What's your number one strategic consideration?" Many organizations said it was cloud. Twenty-seven percent said it was moving collaboration to the cloud via hosted services, 10 percent said cloud via private cloud, with a further 14 percent citing plans to adopt hybrid services. … So cloud is definitely front of mind for customers.