Businesses need to ensure that an information transfer audit is carried out before committing to spending on converged voice, video and data networks.

Rob Bamforth of analyst firm Quocirca said that firms must first analyse delays in existing business processes before going ahead and installing applications such as unified communications, Computer Weekly reports.

"The success of any converged network application should be measured against the reduced time it takes to repeat a common business process, for example, the number of times an engineer needs to call in or increased responsiveness to customer queries," he told a recent conference in London.

Last month Quocirca said that virtualisation is moving into the business mainstream, as IT managers increasingly look to consolidate the number of servers they have to manage.

Meanwhile, a white paper by another analyst firm, IDC, found that outsourcing IT functions can bring environmental benefits because the overall energy usage is reduced due to economies of scale.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'