As many of you know, at Lumison we invested in providing a unified communications offering in late 2009. We believed firmly that 2010 would see a greater focus placed on how we all communicate.

As UK businesses emerge from recession and start to turn their focus to growth greater efficiency will be essential while missed opportunities would prove costly in the land grab towards recovery. That means fully connected workforces and companies able to communicate with customers through a variety of seamlessly joined channels.

It appears IT analyst house Gartner is of the same opinion and claims video will be a killer application for the take-up of unified comms as businesses look to reduce travel costs and time in the name of efficiency.

Gartner predicts more than 200 million of us will be using video as part of our unified comms approach by 2015. That compares to just seven million in 2008.

The greater mobility afforded by unified comms will be further improved by a combination of on-premise, hosted and cloud offerings, Gartner added, stating 40% of businesses would adopt a blended approach by 2012.

This is encouraging news, not just for those of us in the industry but also for those of us who have felt in recent years UK businesses were missing a trick by not eliminating the downtime inherent in communication silos where the right hand of business email never knows what the left hand of business voice communications is doing.