The arrival of the Cloud has brought about the most significant changes the UC industry has seen over the past decade. With cloud migration still by no means universal among UK businesses and /unified-communications/ucaas adoption rates growing year on year, the indications are that the pace of change will not be slowing up any time soon.
To wrap up our Technology Track series on cloud communications, we asked representatives from Fuze, Unify, RingCentral, Natterbox, Cisco, IPCortex and TelcoSwitch to tell us what they thought the shape of things to come was in UCaaS.
Collaboration
One key trend all of our vendors agree on is that the popularity of team collaboration platforms is only going to increase over the next few years. This in turn will drive UCaaS solutions which offer better interoperability and integrations with other software platforms.
Kris Wood, EMEA vice president at Fuze, explained: "In the next few years, collaboration tools will really come into their own. True collaboration happens when employees can easily and effectively exchange information and ideas, regardless of where they are and the technology they are using."
"Employees want to be able to focus on the job in hand, not struggle with the tools they are using. But effective collaboration requires flexibility. UCaaS platforms with open APIs and connectors can quickly accommodate innovative collaboration technologies as they emerge, while ensuring seamless integration with other essential enterprise applications, adapting to the way employees want to work."
Kris added that a significant driver behind this trend is changing expectations from end users in the workplace, whose experience of consumer technology has raised the possibility of being able to communicate, and therefore work, from anywhere.
Unify’s VP for Circuit marketing, Philipp Bohn picked up on this, adding: "We don't think that applications or technology will drive adoption, it is changing user behaviour and new work models that are creating the need for, and with that the adoption of, cloud communication and collaboration."
"We are seeing shifts towards a highly mobile workforce seeking better work-life balance, flexible work environments like co-working spaces and less hierarchical, process-driven organisations moving towards more agile, ad-hoc models.
"To support this transformation and ensure efficient collaboration, we need to bring all relevant use cases (voice, video, screen sharing, team chat, communities, file sharing) into one tool with one easy-to-use interface. Collaboration and digital business workflows also need to be tightly integrated, meaning any state-of-the-art collaboration platform needs to offer APIs to integrate with workflow apps like task management, file sharing, CRM, etc."
Changing technology
Rob Pickering, CEO at IPCortex, agreed that changing habits and experiences with consumer technology were playing a key role in shaping expectations and demands in the workplace. He sees specific technological innovations emerging to meet these demands.
"Business communications technology has been learning lessons from mainstream consumer apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp which provide an efficient, rich, varied and partly asynchronous way to communicate," he said.
"The problem for UC is, as with consumer apps, that most of these tools operate in silos with limited interoperability - a far cry from the universal reach of the telephone. As a result, a new approach is emerging: real time, open, web-based applications that embed comms tools within them, delivered via the Internet as a service.
"This approach - called contextual communications - doesn't just allow businesses to engage with colleagues and customers in the way they want to communicate, while removing barriers, but it makes communication more efficient by being task-based and informed by relevant transactional and trend based data.
"The key technology that makes this feasible is Web Real Time Communication, or WebRTC. This is a disruptive technology that enables real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections via a common set of protocols. We've been developing apps using WebRTC for Chrome and Firefox for the last five years, and now Apple has announced it will support WebRTC on Safari from Autumn 2017. This effectively means that WebRTC is now supported in all modern browsers and is becoming even more ubiquitous, and so contextual communication - which delivers most benefit when engaging with customers, who could be using any device, anywhere - becomes even easier to deploy."
New horizons
Sahil Rekhi, EMEA managing director at RingCentral, also believes that imitating consumer platforms will play a key role in shaping the next wave of /unified-communications/ucaas technology, and also expects new innovations like AI to come into play.
"Video and AI will become more mainstream in the future," he said. "End users are seeking a Facetime-like simplified video experience for business use, telepresence rooms are old school. Automation is another buzz word in the market alongside AI."
"Building a communication system that gives customers the flexibility to adapt the system to more efficient workflows across multiple applications will be key for future growth.
"Faster decision making across the business is also coming out as a key driver for business change and this ecosystem as a service will be a key ask in the future."
