Butler Group, Europe’s leading IT research and advisory organisation, has released wide-scale report stating that ‘communications architecture that has evolved over the last 20 years no longer meets the requirements of today’s organisations’. This is likely to lead to a spate of outsourcing deals as companies try to bring themselves up to date.

The report ‘Communications and Collaboration Report – Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility’ says that organisations are moving ‘from traditional hierarchies based on command and control, to looser structures utilising collaboration and team work shifting from one-to-one to many-to-many communication’.

The report also found that in order to keep up with the modern business world and enable flexibility, enterprises require IP-based infrastructures to capitalise on information mobility. This new communication infrastructure will aid the development of decentralised business models where location of the workforce is no longer a key issue; something that mobile working is making a necessity.

Mark Blowers, Enterprise Architectures Practice Director at Butler Group and co-author of the study said: “The need for new and enhanced service provision to support business requirements must drive infrastructure and technology deployment. There should be a move towards the provision of common integrated communication services, which are ideal for catering for a complex and distributed environment. Web services can also be utilised to mobilise information to all stakeholders”.

“The componentisation and services-based approach increases flexibility, enabling services to be developed independent of the equipment. Using IP-based components instead of vendor-dependent solutions improves scalability, along with driving down infrastructure costs with price/performance optimisation.”