Euro Business Ill-equiped For Remote Working.

Almost 50% of European business managers are disillusioned by their companies' inability to successfully implement new technology for enabling remote or flexible working practices. The new eEurope Report from Nextra, the Business Communications Managed Service Provider, indicates that European managers want access to new technologies, such as VPNs (used for secure access to network from home) and ASP (remote application delivery services), but say that their companies just cannot rise to the challenge. The causes range from lack of allocated expenditure and prioritisation from top management or board, which accounts for 44% of respondents, through to inadequate IT systems and poor implementation of new technology solutions -- which were selected by 43% and 36% of respondents respectively. The research, which focused on middle to senior management in small to medium sized businesses (SMBS) across eight European countries (UK, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic and Slovakia), demonstrates that employees are increasingly more sophisticated about the way they choose to work and more knowledgeable about the technology they require to do so. And, as might be expected, European SMBs are providing managers with equipment, such as mobile or WAP phones (78%) and modem laptops (68%) but communications and networking technologies which are infrastructure based still appear to have a low penetration rate. Only 15% of respondents are actively using VPNS, whilst 11% are utilising ASP service. Despite low user levels throughout Europe currently, VPN was the technology in most demand with 21% of all European respondents singling it out. This trend was also seen in most of the other countries apart from in UK and Germany where the most requested solution was ASP -- with almost 20% of UK respondents selecting ASP as the technology they require. When concentrating on the benefits that remote and flexible working could deliver across Europe, increased productivity was judged to be the main benefit (61%) followed by corporate savings (57%). However within the UK, improved staff morale/retention was judged to be more important as this was.

www.nextra.com