The modalities in which education is offered are changing quickly to meet the demands of today's technically savvy world. Digital transformation is a key means to tackling these challenges.

Research Objectives

The overall research objective is to measure the current use and future decision-making behavior toward information technology (IT) within the education sector. Specifically scrutinized are smart phones, tablets, mobile apps, cloud computing, video, audio, web conferencing, Internet protocol (IP) telephony, company and consumer social media, unified communications client (UCC), time-division multiplexing (TDM) phones, business grade and consumer softphones, customer-relationship management (CRM), headsets, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, and mobile-device management (MDM).

In the report, Frost & Sullivan aims to

• understand the IT-related challenges organizations face today
• assess the current and future use of company communications technologies
• evaluate factors that drive investments in company communications technologies
• gauge communications-infrastructure trends
• appraise available IT budgets
• measure workface impact on IT sources

Executive Summary

The methods in which education is offered is changing quickly to meet the demands of today's technically savvy world. Digital transformation is a key means to tackling these challenges.

• The greatest challenge for IT is the need to train the IT staff on advanced IT technologies.
• Improving customer experience is surprisingly the biggest driver for IT investments. Boosting creativity and innovation is a close-second biggest driver. This is positive news for the education vertical.
• Telephony is the most important technology to deploy in education.
• Education is moving towards integrated solutions.
• Malware poses the biggest security risk for the education industry.
• Security and reliability are the most important criteria considered when selecting a cloud-service provider.
• IT applications are moved to the cloud before telephony ones.
• Customer-facing social media have become a necessary part of any business, regardless of size.