FeatureUC&C22 Dec 2021 · 9 min read

Nine UC Leaders Give their 2022 Predictions

Hybrid work, UCaaS and AI are reshaping collaboration. Published on UC Today, Cisco, Zoom, Poly, RingCentral and Bandwidth leaders set out why it matters.

Tom Wright

UC Today released the latest in its UC Trends series in November, quizzing nine unified communications leaders on subjects from their biggest achievements of 2021 to the items they'd rescue if their house was on fire.

As we creep closer to 2022, we've pulled out the highlights of their responses when asked what they expect to be the breakout trends of the coming 12 months.

You can view every video in our UC Trends 2022 series here or by clicking on the names below.

Javed Khan, GM of Collaboration, Cisco

[caption id="attachment_32428" align="alignright" width="200"] Javed-Khan Javed Khan[/caption]

"We are going to have a hybrid mode of working. We knew how to work when most people were in the office pre-covid, we learned how to work when everyone is home – what is going to be different is when you have a reasonable mix of the two and that, we believe, is going to drive demand for a newer class of experiences.

"It is extremely dangerous to assume that just because we learned how to work when everybody was home, we are OK [in hybrid work]. Hybrid work is going to be fundamentally different to what we have done before and our technology is going to go through yet another shift.

"This is also fundamentally changing how we think about workspaces, and this is the conversation I’m having, not just with IT, but facilities and HR. They are starting to design what their footprint looks like"

"The last thing is there is a broader collaboration platform conversation that is coming back to the fore. When End users made decisions about their platforms, they may have ignored security and manageability, but there are more and more platform conversations in the industry, so users aren’t spending their time in 10 different tools."

Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer, Zoom

[caption id="attachment_35534" align="alignleft" width="200"] Oded Gal[/caption]

"The adoption of video communications is mainstream now. If you asked a lawyer three years ago if they want a video call or phone call they’d default to a phone call. Now it is completely different; everyone is happy to jump on a video call and share their screen, and these experiences have made experiences much effective

"So, what we see is, along with those trends, how do we really build the tools for an organisation to leverage that disruption"

"We announced the Video Engagement Center at Zoomtopia which allows businesses to create those experiences when they engage with their customers. It applies to a support call where you want to show a defective device, but it goes up to an experience with a doctor where you'll go into a meeting room with a nurse, then a meeting with a doctor, then this could then go into a chat or a conversation over the phone and that experience is all integrated"

"That’s one of the things we see and it’s about how we support customers in transitioning to make it a visual experience and think about new use cases that were not applicable to businesses in the past."

Paul Clark, SVP and Managing Director EMEA, Poly

[caption id="attachment_35471" align="alignright" width="200"] Paul Clark[/caption]

"Some businesses talk about needing all their staff back in the office. That is not going to happen on a long-term basis.

"What we’ll see is organisations whole-heartedly embracing flexible and hybrid working practices.

"Hybrid working because, in the fight for talent, that’s what people want so organisations have to respond.

"The other thing that we’re seeing is, people were pretty intolerant of noise in an office before, now they’ve been at home and worked for a while in their own environments… they’re anticipating that they’re going to be incredibly intolerant of noise made by others in the modern workplace"

"Organisations are having to think about, not just the physical design of the office, but also the technology they put in to manage the noise environment.

"The final thing to mention is that we have all gone casual and got used to choosing how we dress. We’re not going to see people turn up in shorts or pyjamas to the office but we are going to see a more casual attire in the office and that’s a good thing because we should allow people to be who they truly are."

Jaya Kumar, CMO, RingCentral

[caption id="attachment_41580" align="alignleft" width="200"] Jaya Kumar[/caption]

“I think there is a dramatic shift towards what I would call UCaaS Lego. People are saying ‘I have services and apps, can you give me a composable enterprise’.

“That is whether its low code, pro code or no code; they want the Lego blocks that allow them to build what they need for their enterprise"

“I think that’s become practical and real, and I believe that trend is going to take off in a much more significant way.

"We’ve all heard about AI and fundamentally the AI was story was man vs machine, let us make the computer as smart as the human. I think that word is flipping over now to IA – which is intelligence augmentation."

"I want the machine to augment my intelligence not prove that it is smarter than me. How do I bring machine-level intelligence into what I’m doing so that I can be a better human expression of myself because I know this augmentation is there?

"I think we’re going to see pervasive IA in everything we do, whether we pick up the phone drive a car… think of all the technologies today that aids a human being to be much more effective and productive. I think that trend is going to take off because the cost has become much lower compared to what it has been historically."

Matt Brown, VP of Product, Bandwidth

"The biggest trend that we’ve seen is that Covid has obviously accelerated the shift to the cloud and that’s across both UC, CC and CPaaS. The challenge has been that a lot of times when enterprises have taken that leap to the cloud, what they’re finding is they’re actually losing a bunch of functionality.

[caption id="attachment_24162" align="alignright" width="200"] Matt Brown[/caption]

"Those homegrown purpose-built systems of the past actually served a purpose.

"They provided a lot of custom functionality that doesn’t exist as they move to a cloud platform and so what I think we’re going to see through 2022 and the next wave of the cloud evolution is the emergence of open platforms that allow enterprises to build on top of these cloud-based systems"

"This will bring back that missing functionality that they had to give up when they made the migration."

Simen Teigre, CEO, Neat

[caption id="attachment_41581" align="alignleft" width="200"] Simen Teigre, Neat Simen Teigre[/caption]

The market has really opened up now and video is no longer a niche part of the market where you only have tech-savvy early adopters.

I think that’s really putting demands on our solutions; they need to be easy to use and really adding value in hybrid work, but I also see that customers need solutions now. They’re much more impatient than before, they want to move much faster and so sales cycles are shorter and buying decisions are faster. A lot of our customers try and then they buy and this is different to the old days of video conferencing where there would be huge projects of hundreds of rooms, big evaluations going on and pilots that would take forever.

"Small companies all the way up to enterprise buy a few Neat products, they test them out, and then they deploy in stages. So they move a lot faster and then they iterate on that to build out their solutions"

"That means we need to support the customer with more flexibility in buying options."

Aurangzeb Khan, SVP, Jabra

"AI has an amazing runway ahead of it.

[caption id="attachment_24256" align="alignright" width="200"] Aurangzeb Khan[/caption]

"We are very focused on developing in that area all-around experience, enablement and data. With the PanaCast 50 we can give people information in the room if they are exceeding the capacity of that space. Smart people with good data make good choices so we think there is a lot more to do down that road.

"In terms of buying behaviour, we’re finding with the PanaCast 20 products there is a lot of individual interest and people are much more aware. They have opinions and they are hearing and reading about what’s becoming possible, but they also don’t want to become their own IT"

"They don’t want to be dealing with the hassle of updates, so corporate buyers are looking across that whole space. When a new person started in the old days they’d get a PC, but now I think they’ll get a PC, a headset or speakerphone, and a camera so they have a toolkit to be productive."

Eric Olson, VP of Sales, Americas, Kurmi

[caption id="attachment_41582" align="alignleft" width="200"] Eric Olson, Kurmi Eric Olson[/caption]

“We’ve seen over the past year or so, a rapid acceleration in the move to the cloud. Models of consumption that are subscription-based are changing.

“We’re seeing enterprise customers who have historically bought and managed a full on-prem solution, or had a third party manage everything for them, really look at the way they’re consuming technology and looking at hybrid approaches to how they’re going to support the technology needs of their organisation"

“A trend we’re seeing today is customers expecting to change the way they buy to the way that they consume so, for Kurmi, it’s really important that we are able to offer this type of capability with different levels of service, different technologies to all of our customer base.”

Simon Harrison, Chief Marketing Officer, Avaya

"Gartner prediction on CPaaS is that by 2022, 90 per cent of enterprises will have CPaaS as a core IT skillset – that changes everything.

[caption id="attachment_41583" align="alignright" width="200"] Simon Harrison, Avaya Simon Harrison[/caption]

"Now, a vendor that goes in with an offering that is designed to be vanilla and provide speed to value is going to have to sell companies on how [their product] adds more value than what they can compose themselves"

"We’re also the most difficult customers that we have ever been because we want to be relentless connected but then, when it suits us, left alone. And we want to connect to businesses in the way that we connect with each other.

"You can no longer look at things in a narrow way; you can’t just look at a CCaaS application or a UCaaS application and think ‘I’ve solved [the problem]’. You have to think about composability."

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