Cisco’s Top 10 Predictions for 2010

While history can often be a guide for anticipating the future, this past year was, in many ways, an anomaly. We entered the year mired in what many are calling the Great Recession – with projects, spending and hiring stalled or frozen across consumer, small business and enterprise segments around the world. As we close the year, and can see signs of economic improvements, debate continues about the fragility of the economic recovery.

While it was a challenging year, many business leaders have reflected upon 2009 as a year when they took decisive action to ensure their businesses would both weather the storm and emerge from the downturn stronger than their competitors. Like Cisco, many of these leaders believe that downturns bring opportunities to accelerate for upturns, and began investing in technologies that would help drive operational efficiency and innovation, and build closer ties with their customers and partners.

Already, companies such as Proctor & Gamble and SAP are using unified communications and collaboration solutions to improve product development and build trust with internal and external stakeholders, while driving down costs associated with travel and operations. In fact, these two companies alone now spend more than 1 million minutes conducting intercompany meetings (using Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Unified Communications) for significant time and travel savings.

With that backdrop, Cisco believes that the enterprise unified communications market will see a modest recovery in spending from last year, as a large number of organizations rekindling unified communications and collaboration initiatives. Companies that have already seen the power of collaboration will take their investments to the next level. Some leadership teams will view 2010 as an opportunity to pull ahead of their competition by investing in a collaboration architecture that will further improve their team’s productivity and tighten their relationships with their global employees, partners, suppliers and customers.

Here, then, are Cisco’s 10 predictions for 2010:

1. Enterprise Collaboration Suites Converge – today’s disparate text (IM, email, social software), voice (telephony) and video (desktop, room-based and telepresence) solutions begin to converge this year as leading vendors release combined solutions promising further productivity and total cost of ownership gains. Early adoption by industry leaders will begin in the middle of the year and accelerate in the second half of the year.

2. Video Goes Mainstream – many organizations will maintain reduced travel budgets by investing in and promoting the use of a variety of real-time, high-definition video solutions, as well as on-demand offerings. Video usage will be pervasive throughout business. Additionally, simplified internal video sharing capabilities will support the growing use of recorded webcasts for time-shifted one-to-many communication.

3. Intercompany Communication and Collaboration – larger organizations will seek to apply the same productivity enhancements they found for their employees amongst their networks (e.g., suppliers, distributors, agents). We will see rapid standards evolution and product innovation to support demand for intercompany collaboration with secure text, voice, video, and presence capabilities.

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