UC Today recently attended the European VoIP Summit held in Amsterdam this October to catch up on the latest news from the industry.
Organised by research and consultancy group, Cavell, the European VoIP Summit conference brought together numerous representatives from key brands within the industry such as BroadSoft, Cisco, Polycom and Nuvias to deliver an in-depth review of all the latest trends and predictions of where the European VoIP marketplace currently is and where it is heading over the next 12months.
In the opening keynote presentation, senior analysts at Cavell, Rob Kurver and Dominic Black, gave an overview on the current state of the European markets, informing attendees that the age of ISDN is coming to an end in Europe with KPN terminating their support in the Netherlands for the channel in 2019, followed by BT in 2020 and others expected to follow the trend in the future.
Though cloud adoption in the German market is currently way behind the UK and Benelux, it was revealed that the country is expected to experience a huge 21% year on year growth over the next five years, with France rising at 20% and Southern Europe trailing behind at 13.5%.
In contrast to the decline of ISDN, we are now facing a huge increase in SME and enterprise cloud adoption throughout Europe, with the market expected to grow from $21.2 billion in 2015 to $33.7 billion in 2018 at a CAGR of 16.7%, thus creating a fantastic opportunity for service providers to branch out into new markets that extend beyond traditional voice and connectivity alone.
Leading this growth, we can see that IaaS (3 Year CAGR 15%) and collaboration apps (3 year CAGR 20%) will play a crucial part in the future of business communications and service providers must recognise and incorporate these services into their propositions if they want to stay competitive and relevant in the future.
However, now that we are seeing big brands moving in to SME markets to capitalise on this growth, with the launch of Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook and RingCentral’s purchasing of Glip, there is a rising concern for what kind of role the service provider will have in the future of the market and whether or not they will be able to compete with these huge enterprises going direct to the customer.
Service Providers Vs Large Valued Business
In the opening panel session, there was a discussion on how big vendors, particularly Microsoft, have changed the game considerably within the industry by focussing their attention on the desktop and driving the idea of the complete, unified digital workspace.
If we were to look at Microsoft Teams, for example, and its recent take-over of Skype for Business, we can see how the application has evolved from a collaboration tool alone and repositioned itself as a centralised communications hub for all of Microsoft Office’s functions.
With this service, businesses can now easily access multiple channels (voice, video, conferencing, IM), from a single application that’s delivered to them directly by a single vendor – and the convenience and efficiency it offers, along with the world-class, industry-leading technology, is very concerning for the service provider that’s trying find value in the modern market.
However, though there are doubts, Technology Leader of Collaboration at Cisco, Johan van Puymbrouck, believes this shift is a huge advantage for the service provider, claiming that
