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IT pros: UC wants you!
By Stuart Corner
Friday, 31 October 2008 05:13

IT Market - Method
Frost & Sullivan says there is a shortage of systems integrators with the skills needed to implement unified communications in enterprises and training provider Dimension Data Learning Solutions reports a sharp uptake in people taking its UC courses.

Frost & Sullivan says the skills shortage is the result of strong growth in the UC market in Australia. It expects expenditure on unified communications systems and services to be double the 2007 figure and worth almost $800m by 2014.

According to Audrey William, F&S's senior research manager,Genuine Windows 7, "The relative infancy of the UC market and continual development of new applications also mean that there is a limited number of system integrators with the depth of skills required to support fully-fledged UC deployments."

William advises SIs to "start developing the appropriate skills now. It's going to require investment and a commitment to training and certification over the next 12 to 18 months."

Dimension Data Learning Solutions (DDLS) recently expanded its range of unified communications courses and now claims to offer "the widest range of training courses for UC in Australia."

General manager, David Gage, told iTWire "In the last six months we have seen a 40 percent increase in uptake of UC related courses and in the last quarter year-on-year growth has been 50 percent."

He added "We train both SI and end user people and we are seeing a greater percentage from the SI space, which says to me they are seeing the demand and skilling up for 2009."

Gage says he expects the UC market in corporate Australia to evolve from pilot projects to large scale deployments. "From talking to customers,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, I saw a lot of UC pilots in 2008, but 2009 will be all about deployments. A lot of organisations have UC as part of their strategic initiative for next year."

Nor does he believe that the current financial crisis will have much of an impact. "The key drivers for UC are productivity and business process improvement and there is a need to drive these in an economic downturn, so I expect planned deployments to press ahead."

Gage added that "US is a highly complex area so we get a wide range of job skills in the people coming through." His comments were echoed by William who said: "As UC calls for integration of various applications plus integration to overall business processes,Office Home And Student 2010, projects are typically complex and require a significant understanding of network, voice and desktop components."

According to F&S, maintenance services,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, " the mainstay of traditional IT services income" accounted for 14.9 percent of total UC services revenues in 2007 but it expects this to decline over time and the expense of integration and implementation services as system integrators seek to differentiate their offerings and move up the value chain by delivering higher-margin services in the hosted, consulting, integration and managed services segments.