While the opportunities for collaboration are apparent in services like email, instant messaging and conferencing, and the appeal of such collaboration is a matter of personal taste, the actual business impact of that collaboration has been somewhat more difficult to measure.

This week, however, collaboration technology providers Verizon Business (verizonbusiness.com) and Microsoft (microsoft.com) presented the results of a study sponsored by the companies and conducted by research group Frost & Sullivan (frost.com).

In an online presentation, delivered not coincidentally through Microsoft's Live Meeting application, the companies discussed the results of their study Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance, and their efforts to measure the business impact of collaboration.

The study followed a similar study, Meetings Across America, conducted by Verizon Business during its time as MCI, says Nancy Gofus, vice president of product management at Verizon Business, seeking similar insight on a larger global scale.

"[Meetings Across America] provided insight into meeting behavior and adoption of conferencing services here in the United States," she says. "With Meetings around the World, we are partnering with Microsoft to expand our study geographically and also in scope to keep our finger on the pulse of the collaboration industry."

The survey dealt with 900 respondents from a cross section of small, mid-market and large organizations from around the world. The sample was divided among Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United States.

Not surprisingly, the companies report that collaboration is a significant contributor to business performance. But the degree of influence is particularly notable when compared to several other contributing factors measured in the study.

"Our goal when we set out to do this study was to create an actual measure of collaboration, - what we call the 'collaboration index' - and to examine collaboration across geographic regions and key industries," says Gofus. "We wanted to understand just how collaborative business are today and we wanted to study the attitudes and behaviors of professionals as they work together in teams."

Frost & Sullivan designed the collaboration index specifically for the study, creating a measure of relative collaborativeness, based on both a company's capability for collaboration and the quality and extent of that collaboration.

The study compared the impact on business of collaboration, of course, along with strategic orientation, which describes how aggressively a company pursues new markets or new opportunities, and market turbulence, which is defined as how dynamic the market environment is, in which an organization operates.

According to Frost & Sullivan researcher Brian Cotton, the collaboration index score was by far the most relevant to business performance.

"Of the three factors we studied," he says, "we found that quality of collaboration accounted for 36 percent of business performance, whereas strategic orientation accounted for 16 percent and market turbulance [accounted for] 7 percent of that performance."

It may be difficult to measure to what extent collaboration is contributing directly to better-performing businesses, rather than more efficient businesses moving quickly to adopt collaboration technologies. But either scenario is obviously appetizing  to companies like Verizon Business and Microsoft.

"At Microsoft, our research has shown that information workers are increasing their use of collaboration technologies to help increase productivity and improve business efficiencies," said Susan Conway, a senior consultant at Microsoft, in a press release. "As adoption of collaboration technology grows, it is crucial to provide information workers with collaboration solutions that take the complexity out of communication. Microsoft is providing information workers with a unified communications experience that breaks down the silos of communications that exist today and brings them together into an intuitive experience that puts people at the center."