When it comes down to it, predicting future trends in industry is very much a matter of opinion. Different people gaze into the tech crystal ball and draw very different conclusions from what they see.
So it is for the Internet of Things (IoT). For many, the networking of everyday devices, appliances and machinery into smart data sharing networks is the next great revolution in digital technology, set to sweep all before it, including UC.
Others in the UC industry, however, fail to see what all the fuss is about. UC is, first and foremost, about people to people communications through the medium of technology. Leave machines talking to machines to those with an interest in automating systems, and the Big Data analysts striving to eek out productivity and efficiency gains from mountains of digital data.
So it was that No Jitter ran an article earlier this month questioning whether all of the hype about IoT in the UC industry was not just people latching onto another marketing buzzword. By contrast, almost 12 months to the day previously, No Jitter ran an article arguing that there was real value in drawing the concepts of IoT and Unified Communications together.
Of course, there is no definitive right and wrong here. As things stand, the IoT has yet to really take off in a meaningful way, so all the talk is about potential and maybes. In terms of future planning and responding to the market, what telecoms companies need to think about is whether IoT should remain on their radar.
You can see why some are sceptical about its relevance. As mentioned above, IoT involves a different order of communication to UC. Most of its applications are industrial, such as sensors tracking and controlling machine run processes, plugging medical equipment into healthcare databases, integrating security and surveillance networks and creating smart systems for managing utilities provision like energy. Is there a role for integrated voice, video, text and collaboration platforms in all of that?
On the other hand, there are points of convergence UC developers and vendors should be aware of. If IoT was only a matter of machine to machine data sharing, then there probably wouldn’t be much relevance to UC at all. But it also involves machine to person communication, and that raises the question of whether or not there are scenarios where person to person communication could not also be aligned.
