UCaaS is everywhere in 2022. Over the last couple of years, the pandemic challenges have accelerated the move to the cloud for the majority of companies, large and small. Companies can’t thrive without excellent communications, and in a distributed environment, connections happen best through the cloud. UCaaS is the key to business continuity and agility, and continued growth.
At present, experts believe around 70% of organisations will be leveraging UCaaS to some extent by 2023. This means throughout 2022; we’re likely to see an astronomical adoption of cloud technology. The question is, what kind of trends will be shaping the future of UCaaS as we know it?
Here are some of the most significant trends influencing how companies will invest in Unified Communications as a Service in the year ahead.
The Consolidation of UCaaS and (X)aaS
One of the major factors driving the adoption of UCaaS today is the challenge of the pandemic. Companies have discovered that they may be left without a fully operating company without a digital approach to business communications if the office suddenly has to close its doors. Moving into the cloud and leveraging more “as a service” offerings give companies more freedom to operate in an agile format, changing to suit the marketplace's needs.
As investments in “aaS” solutions grow, UCaaS will only be one of the many tools companies need to consider. Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) will also be essential for many brands, along with Communications Platforms as a Service. To reduce the number of complex platforms brands, have to navigate, there’s a good chance we’ll see more of these “aaS” spaces coming together in an all-in-one cloud environment.
Building Better Experiences for Staff
The pandemic and a sudden shift to remote and hybrid working practices forced companies of all backgrounds to pay closer attention to supporting and enabling their staff. Employees unable to access the right tools in a comfortable, convenient environment could also deliver the right business results. Brands discovered that employee experience is the key to customer experience and a more robust business bottom line.
UCaaS innovation in the future will centre around developing convenient experiences for employees, wherever they are. This involves not just enabling things like hybrid work with a UCaaS experience that remains consistent for users across all platforms but investing in new technology. Around 4 in 10 organisations plan on implementing AI into UC applications in the future, for instance. AI solutions can help noise cancellation for better meetings to automatically record and transcribe conversations.
Intercompany Collaboration
The rapid rush to a complex remote environment in 2020 and 2021 led to several problems for many companies, including poor approaches to external collaboration. Users in the modern world need to leverage UCaaS not just to reach their internal colleagues but also staff from other companies and partners, vendors, and stakeholders.
As we move ahead into 2022, companies will need to think about the “guest account sprawl” in their UCaaS environments in terms of issues with compliance, security, governance, and costs. Increasingly, UCaaS vendors will also need to think about enabling team members to collaborate with external contacts anywhere, regardless of which collaboration software or hardware they want to use. Interoperability continues to be a significant challenge in the UCaaS space, but it’s something more companies are working towards.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Carrier)
Many experts believe the future of UCaaS will be built on a foundation of flexible, adaptable, and open environments. Companies will want to access the productivity tools they love from one provider and the voice connectivity they want from a separate vendor without compromise. This has prompted an increasing number of “Bring Your Own Carrier” offerings.
