Dave Michels, industry analyst and expert with TalkingPointz, recently spoke with UC Today about what 2024 has in store for the enterprise communications world, exploring how the meeting room vendor landscape might shrink, the ever-growing prominence of mobility, and how RCS will challenge and potentially even supplant SMS as a dominant form of B2B or B2C communications.
Here's what Michels anticipates will happen this year:
The Microsoft Meeting Room Space will be Consolidated
Michels' first prediction is that the Microsoft meeting room space will be consolidated.
"Maybe consolidate is the wrong word, but the vendor landscape will become smaller," Michels added. "I don't think demand will go away; in fact, it might even grow, but Microsoft has added a lot of vendors over the year, in part to meet their global demand."
"However, they added Cisco in late 2022 and then throughout 2023, Cisco has been building up that capability of all of their room systems. Cisco has added a lot of sales capability and a lot of global reach, and I think they're going to take a lot of that market."
Michels expanded, noting that Cisco's growth in room systems has put considerable pressure on some of the vendors in this space.
"Some vendors, like HP Poly, will bundle," Michels predicted. "But other vendors that can't bundle will feel that pressure and either withdraw from that market or be acquired, and we'll see some consolidation."
