They say that sometimes you have to look backwards to move forwards. That’s something Rob Pickering would agree with.
While most of the attention in Unified Communications industry is, understandably, on present and future forms of communication - the Cloud, multimedia applications, social media - the man who founded British vendor IPCortex believes we shouldn’t lose sight of the the lessons offered by a much older type of technology. Namely, the telephone.
“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 explained.
“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.”
For Rob, the key challenge for the future of the UC industry is to break out of the proprietary software model which has come to dominate the market. His company is one of a number which have come to the conclusion that end users would prefer to use a single app to for all forms of contact, regardless of which apps those people were using. Just as you can with a telephone.
Explaining the impact of this thinking on business communications, Rob said:
“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 only 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.”
Frictionless
To support this approach, IPCortex makes a comprehensive range of APIs for its business UCaaS solution, IPCortex Hosted Suite, readily available to the developer community. Rob wants to see customers take IPCortex applications and use them to create their own bespoke communications solutions, by embedding them in the platforms they already use.
“A simple example of this would be a customer having a multimedia conversation with an advisor directly from an application or webpage that they are already on,” he said. “This is efficient, frictionless communication - an alternative to the distracting and time consuming process of realising a call is needed, then thinking about the best way to make contact, choosing a standalone device or program before finally initiating the conversation.
“As the potential of context is fully realised, we’ll see simplified user experiences, as well as greater efficiencies and convenience both for the customer and the organisation they’re engaging with."
“The best contextual applications will provide this by meshing in all the information needed to effectively exchange real-time and non-real time communication flows which are appropriate to the phase of each task. We believe contextual comms will gain significant traction in the coming years and deliver a fundamental shift in how people communicate - all delivered via the cloud.”
Along with the Cloud, and companies throwing off the proprietary shackles in favour of open software architectures, Rob believes another recent technological innovation will be key to achieving this - WebRTC.
“WebRTC is a disruptive technology that enables real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections via a common set of protocols,” he explained. “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 Autumn 2017.
“This effectively means that WebRTC is now supported in all modern browsers and is becoming even more ubiquitous. As a result, contextual communication - which delivers most benefit when engaging with customers, who could be using any device, anywhere - becomes even easier to deploy.”
Asked whether he anticipates any stumbling blocks in overcoming what has become a deeply embedded proprietary culture in business telecom, Rob believes ultimately common sense will prevail.
