UC has been around for a fair while. But, it’s not yet reached household status. At home, we comfortably converse using the phone and emails, but good money could be wagered that both your neighbour and your mother don’t know what Unified Communications is all about.
In a more positive light, what we do see is rapid adoption in the business world. Driven by employees or employers, businesses want the productivity gains associated with Unified Comms, and they want it now. CIOs have learned to trust the cloud in other areas of the business and are happy to move their comms environment alongside them.
Credit also must go to the collaboration world. The emergence of companies like Slack have forced players like Microsoft and Cisco to react. What was once viewed as a competitive Unified Comms offering now looks incredibly different. It is no longer acceptable for businesses to make an investment in cloud communications technology and only be offered video calling and screen sharing.
Due to great marketing and exceptional user experience, customers have the inherited the right to demand more. More from their employer, more from their comms vendor and more from a suite of communication tools.
Is Unified Comms Being Left Behind?
With the undisputable benefits that collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and WebEx Teams enable, it’s easy to think Unified Comms could get left behind. Some argue that UC is changing, being overtaken by collaboration, but in fact we can’t have collaboration without communication. In an article debating whether Slack was fit for the enterprise, I covered some key areas. Security, scalability and making an old-fashioned phone call were just the start.
The article concluded that Slack remains a no-brainer for the SMB, a desire for the enterprise and a massive headache for enterprise UC&C. But UC&C has kicked on. Through organic development and/or acquisition, the more typical Unified Comms vendors are now able to compete with the fully-fledged collaboration players.
Unified Comms Sneaks Into Collaboration
Unified Communications provider, RingCentral, has many out of the box integrations. However, their native collaboration software, Glip, performs most of the functionality that you would be shopping for when looking at Slack. That’s just one example but it’s very high on the roadmap for the cloud Unified Comms vendors.
Unlike Slack, Stride and Ryver, the Unified Comms players have a major advantage. The telephone! It’s one thing layering a collaboration platform on top of your telephony. But, for complete future proofing, everything in one box (or virtual box as it’s in the cloud) stemming from a cloud phone system, with the cloud and software reach of a /unified-communications/ucaas provider, puts businesses in a great position to grow and move with the times.
Omni-Channel; Friend Or Foe?
Unified Communications and Contact Centres go hand in hand. It’s important for CIOs and business leaders to learn and remember that the “as a Service” model has opened the door to new opportunities for vendors. Players such as 8×8 and Genesys provide both UCaaS and CCaaS which puts them in a unique position.
The addition of omni-channel into this market puts Unified Comms on steroids. Suddenly, a company goes from receiving incoming calls and working out how well they perform from their bill to a fully functioning contact centre with mapped customer journeys, engaged employees in a virtual team and predictable analytics running their workforce.
Not bad for an industry being left behind.
Emerging Tech
It seems every day that a new piece of technology is launched. We’ve seen Apple Business Chat launched in Beta, Google roll out a virtual assistant and many a drone doing the shopping. Aside from the shopping, these all have a place in business communications. This means Unified Comms vendors cannot afford to sit still.
The danger of doing nothing and hoping a portfolio holds its own is suicide. The risk massively outweighs the reward. Sure, a vendor can win one big deal this month, but failure to keep pace is in every vendors risk log.
UC&C Is Now
Unified Communications has been around for a fair while. But, it’s not yet reached household status.
It’s easy to sit and type this. As an employee of the industry for ten years, it’s all I’ve known. To the buyer, Unified Comms is only just getting going. And it’s the perfect time to be investing.
UC has fast become UC&C. The two seemingly separate services have converged to become one super service. Rather than shopping for software that works with your communications investment, you can drive your collaboration adoption through your communications purchase.
The benefits of both Unified Comms and Collaboration technologies are already widely known. The benefit of both streams combined in one area are so powerful, it’s hard to see any change other than constant innovation.
UC&C is not just now. UC&C is now, the future and constantly evolving. You’d be brave to opt against the upward curve.
