A new CDW Unified Communications Tracking Poll recently surveyed 915 respondents who are actively involved with unified communications related technologies, including 150 individuals each from American “medium/large” businesses, federal, state, and local governments, healthcare workers, and higher education and K-12 public school administrators.

CDW describes Unified Communications (UC) as “the convergence of enterprise voice, video and data services and software applications to achieve greater collaboration among individuals or groups and improve business processes.”

The survey reveals that for this group the feeling is that the market for technological solutions to UC has equalized over the past year. But noticable are the changes in the makeup and usage within a particular UC solution. In particular, telephony-centric approaches to communication have decreased. In 2009, telephony users made up 32% of the market, while in 2010 they only make up 26%. Email and IM communications approaches have grown to fill this gap, increasing from 29% to 43% of the total market Email use in particular has soared from 18% to 29%.

Although rich media conferencing remains the most popular approach, its percentage of the market has decreased from 39% to 31%. Some of these numbers are close to the margin of error for the survey, however, which is around 3%. That means the general trends are likely to be accurate but not necessarily the relative amounts.