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5 UC predictions
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Steve Harris, EVP Unified Communications at Nuvias
draws on his many years’ experience in the UC market to
deliver his top five predictions.
The Unified Communications (UC) market has been
through numerous hype cycles and has not always
delivered on early promises. Times have changed and
in a maturing, fast-growing market, the collective views
is that there are exciting times ahead. As well as strong
established players, the UC space is rich in innovation,
driven by dynamic new start-ups. This mix leads me to
my first confident prediction.
1. More Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As)
The second half of 2018 saw some interesting M&A
moves in terms of geographical and vertical expansions
from Gamma, Centile, EvolveIP and Blueface along
with solution-based acquisitions such as the 8x8’s
purchase of Jitsi Video Communications Technology
from Atlassian. There are no signs of this activity
slowing. In fact, UC M&A activity into the next decade
will accelerate as both vendors and Service Providers
fight to gain momentum and market share.
2. The rise of WebRTC
Everyone’s talking about user experience and the
user interface. Nothing new there, but there is now
a complete focus on the overall UI and UX, with
both video, messaging and content sharing seen
as mandatory to drive better communication and
collaboration.
While WebRTC has been viewed as an interesting
but niche technology to drive these solutions to the
desktop, it has seen significant growth within contact
centre and customer services environments. Now
WebRTC technology has matured, this will spread and
become more prevalent across the whole UC space.
3. The One-Stop-Shop
We are now seeing Service Providers looking to bundle
entire solutions for UC across connectivity, hardware
and software. It’s becoming increasingly important to
do this against the large Over The Top (OTT) players
coming into the market and to deliver a simple
proposition that is easy to consume and manage. At
the same time, providers are also looking more at
customisation and integration to differentiate against
more standard and volume-based propositions. The
market is becoming more competitive and providers
need to be very clear and clever to invest in their
differentiators and remain relevant with both existing
and new end customers.
4. Security and Analytics
Security is no longer an option and UC vendors,
resellers and Service Providers need to deliver
solutions that protect their customers and their
customers’ customers.
The focus on analytics will gain pace. Tracking and
monitoring user consumption of UC services will
become the norm as businesses come to rely on data
to measure adoption and analyse how staff collaborate
and interact to improve productivity. This type of data
is already commonplace in IT based applications and is
rapidly moving at into UC.
5. Blurring of Lines
My last prediction is all about the battle for hearts,
minds and wallets. There has been a continued
drive from UC vendors to enter the Service Provider
space and offer their applications from the Cloud.
System Integrators are now offering network services
themselves or are being acquired by Service Providers
to expand their offering. Direct Marketing Resellers
are investing in their services propositions and cloud
capabilities, adding more value beyond hardware and
software. Distributors are also much less hardwarebased.
In fact, the overall UC landscape is becoming
blurred with new partnerships and types of providers
emerging in a rush to ‘land grab’ a share if the growing
UC market.
What is clear is that the UC market has reached an
exciting tipping point as the technology becomes
mainstream and an integral part of the IT fabric. And it’s
no longer technology just for the large corporates; UC
is now open to everyone and revolutionising the way
many SMEs do business.
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