Wireless LAN and VPN penetration remain constant at around 44% considering current and future adoption. VPNs have been employed innovatively by Indian organizations with MPLS VPN technology being used for remote connectivity in many cases.

Mobile email is popular with nearly 50% of the companies going for it. In the next two years, its adoption will increase to 60%. This reflects the growing importance of enterprise mobility application.

Where do they Spend?
The top five technologies in which the enterprises are looking to invest in are—DSL, domestic leased line, VSAT, application hosting (ERP, CRM and SCM) and VPN. It is interesting to note that domestic leased line and VPN are the only technologies where organizations across all the verticals will spend.

Vendors need to look at the ITeS sector for international leased line, while Oil & Gas and Manufacturing will spend more on domestic leased line. Application hosting is going to be hot for FMCG/Consumer Durables/Food & Beverages, and Media & Entertainment. BFSI and Energy/Utility/Infrastructure sector are eager to invest heavily for VSAT in the following years.

Choosing Service Providers
The survey results rank BSNL (32%) as the most preferred primary connectivity service provider, next is VSNL (19%) closely followed by Airtel (18%). However, VSNL is the highest in overall satisfaction closely followed by MTNL. However, this is only indicative of the sample covered and does not necessarily represent the overall market.

Among various factors of satisfaction criteria for a service provider, the implementation process has the most influence on overall satisfaction. This includes critical parameters such as functional and technical understanding of the team from the service provider who could articulate the exact need of the organization and deliver suitable mix of different services within committed time without charging high price.

In case of BSNL and Airtel, enterprises have ranked them high on their ability to take end-to-end responsibility. VSNL is top most in network robustness, reliability, and redundancy. MTNL is ranked highest for ensuring networking security.

With respect to desirable qualities from their service providers, the enterprises have identified three main areas of concern—simplifying the SLAs as per customer satisfaction, to reduce outage duration and frequency drastically and to be able to quickly respond and resolve failures.

Buying Behaviour
It comes as no surprise that the decision making process for buying technology for communications is centralized. Only 5% of the companies do not mind taking decentralized decisions when it comes to buying technology. Typically, these industry verticals are—Manufacturing, FMCG/Consumer Durables/Food & Beverages, BFSI, Oil & Gas, and IT/ITeS.

The primary decision maker for ICT purchases is the CIO/CTO/IT head of the organization (62%), while top management consisting of MD/CEO/COO comes a distant second (26%) as decision makers. However, interestingly, when it comes to choosing the technologies, the influencers for the ICT purchases are primarily the IT division staff.

In more than 80% organizations, the group that manages enterprise voice communications also manages IT or Internet services in the organization. Only around one in every twelve organizations, there are a completely separate groups managing the two.

Infrastructure Challenges
As enterprises expand, the foremost priority is connectivity for voice and data traffic. When organizations are able to think and make decisions on their feet, with real-time access to required information, they can be more productive and provide better service.

The top five challenges in communication infrastructure facing the enterprises today are getting connectivity options in smaller towns—requiring more network access to cater to remote access, tackling shortage of trained manpower, connecting handheld devices to the network and integrating voice and data traffic. Issues like after sales support and managing networks, scaling up and getting to know new technologies are some of the other areas of concern.