On the heels of our Sprint Complete Collaboration announcement last week, a top industry analyst group has come out with a memorandum on hosted collaboration that tells the strategic story concisely and thoroughly.

Titled Top 10 Reasons for Hosted Collaboration, the Yankee Group document is in the form of a presentation. It's really worth a few minutes of your time to take a look.

Setting the stage for the reasons why, Yankee Group notes that in today's multi-national or global organization, work groups can be spread across many regions. That creates a need for greater collaboration, in order to "harness the power" of the extended enterprise. By speeding the decision-making process, it gives the more nimble companies a competitive advantage. And of course, Unified Communications and collaboration technologies provide the foundation.

The presentation also touches on the issues that enterprises struggle with when it comes to implementing UC and collaboration. Such as a lack of in-house UC expertise, questions about vendor interoperability, uncertainty about whether the anticipated ROI will materialize, and budget constraints.

Hosted collaboration, the Yankee Group concludes, provides an answer by pushing the infrastructure and complexity into the cloud. That takes the issues off the table when it comes to a lack of in-house expertise, vendor interoperability, and budget (at least the capital expenditure segments). Also, the document notes, by leveraging end-to-end IP connectivity, it assures higher uptime and better quality, with a solution that is optimized for the era of mobility.

Here, by the way, is what Yankee Group sees as the 10 reasons to go hosted:
    1) Flexibility of deployment
    2) Centralized management
    3) Faster time to market
    4) Extending the solution quickly beyond the corporate walls
    5) Enabling consumerization
    6) Budget efficiency
    7) Improved disaster recovery capabilities
    8) Application diversity
    9) Improved business agility
    10) Low-cost migration