A survey of 250 IT leaders in the U.S. published today finds a full 87% would consider swapping out their current suite of productivity applications in favor of a more secure unified platform.

Conducted by JumpCloud in collaboration with Google Workspace, the survey finds that only 6% are not experiencing any challenges.

On average, survey respondents are using nine different productivity tools, with more than three-quarters (79%) having attempted to unify them using add-ons or third-party tools. ​However, 58% said those efforts are unsustainable, while 38% report that it only works with a high amount of ongoing administrative effort.

Chase Doelling, principal strategist and director at JumpCloud, said the survey results suggest there is significant room for improvement when it comes to collaboration.

For example, the survey finds top challenges include complexity stemming from managing multiple device types (36%), complexity stemming from managing identity, access, and devices (34%), friction enforcing security policies (34%), vendor lock-in that limits flexibility (29%) and licensing and add-on costs (24%).

Overall, 46% said the management of identity across their tools is not unified, while 62% said device management is not fully unified and automated. ​Nearly two-thirds also noted that security policy enforcement is not fully unified, while 66% said compliance management is not fully unified.

A full 64% of respondents report using Google Workspace alongside Microsoft 365, with only 2% having not explored alternatives to Microsoft 365.

While personal preference is a major factor when it comes to selecting any collaboration tool, it’s not clear that IT leaders are inclined to enforce standardization. Such an effort requires expending a significant amount of personal capital, especially if there are large numbers of end users that prefer one platform over another, noted Doelling.

However, it’s also clear that the days when Microsoft dominated the personal productivity tool category are no longer. The number of organizations using alternative platforms continues to grow, with many also making available Microsoft applications in case there is a need to collaborate with another department or organization.

In the meantime, as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) continue to be made, there will come a time when the friction that is currently experienced when employing multiple collaboration and productivity tools will be shapely reduced. For example, via a natural language interface, it should become simpler to designate a task to an AI agent without having to switch to a different user interface to invoke a separate tool. As those advances are made, the underlying productivity or collaboration tool or platform selected should become less relevant.

Inevitably, there will always be some effort made to centralize productivity and collaboration tools and platforms to better control costs. The challenge is that making a transition to a new tool or platform tends to create a significant amount of disruption to workflows. Ultimately, each organization will need to determine how much of a tradeoff to make between reducing costs and the level of disruption that might ensue. The one thing that is for certain is regardless of which tools and platforms are selected, there will always be a faction that wishes some other choice had been made instead.