The last 12 months have seen unified comms and collaboration platforms adopted like never before.
But a by-product of deploying new technology at such a frantic pace is that infrastructure can become siloed, as old systems are not integrated or simply left to gather dust.
That is the view of John Tucker, VP of UC at Metaswitch, who said that while adoption of next-gen tech has accelerated as businesses battle through the pandemic, in many cases, this has not translated to true digital transformation.
“It’s true that there has been massive adoption of new technology in business, but transformation is not just consuming the new, it’s about addressing the legacy, whether it’s transforming it or retiring it,” he said.
“That hasn’t really happened. There are huge amounts of businesses that haven’t turned off the contract for their premises; it’s still there and currently redundant because no one is in the office.
“We’ve spent 12 months basically with our finger on the pause button of transformation.”
Tucker explained that the adoption of new tech, coupled with not phasing out the old, has created silos in businesses that need to be addressed – particularly as more people return to offices and companies experience true hybrid working on a mass scale for the first time.
This is also true for operators, some of which will have rolled out new technology at an impressive pace, perhaps at the expense of having a complete story to take to the market.
Tucker said that operators which had already embraced new UCaaS and collaboration tools before the pandemic have thrived because they knew how to address the customer’s challenges.
“If an operator has built out its capability set with a discreet trunking platform, a separate white-labelled UCaaS, a separate division managing customers that want to consume Teams, it becomes very hard to meet customers where they actually are.
“The operators that will be successful will be the ones that can build more joined-up and integrated solutions”
The Teams Effect
It is likely that many of these operators will be creating solutions around Microsoft Teams, which rocketed to 115 million daily active users last year.
Metaswitch itself is now under Microsoft ownership with the acquisition announced back in May. Tucker stressed that Microsoft remains committed to an “open ecosystem” in the comms space, and enabling operator owned and branded services from Metaswitch along with its own Teams stack.
He said that this creates an opportunity for channel partners and operators to add value to the end customers.
John Tucker[/caption]
