During my time at UC EXPO 2017, I had the fantastic opportunity to speak with a range of different vendors and experts about the future path for UC, and where communications are headed. One particularly exciting conversation, was the one I had with Dean Bubley, an analyst and consultant specialising in the field of UC for more than twenty years. During his time in the industry, Bubley has addressed just about every possible aspect of UC, including conferencing, messaging, video, telecoms, /unified-communications/ucaas, and more, from an enterprise, business, and consumer perspective.
It's Dean's job to address and consolidate all of the different technological developments in the communications area, and try to plan a course for where the industry is headed. I caught up with him to see if he could give UC Today a few directions.
The Biggest Challenges for Enterprises in UC
The first thing I wanted to ask about, is what Bubley considered to be the biggest challenges facing enterprises in this highly-disruptive industry.
"I suppose a lot of it is the tension between user preferences and technological realities. Where are we on the pendulum of centralised vs decentralised decision making?" Bubley commented that, from a centralised perspective, we've got things like historical IT and telecom functions merging together. On the other hand, from a decentralised perspective, we've got people bringing their own preferences to the workplace, in a "Bring your own UC environment".
Dean also noted that the sector is starting to see more engagement from different users in the enterprise environment, such as CMOs, instead of just CIOs. In other words, marketing will have its own preferences, and so will the customer experience management team and so on. In this environment of growing UC, voice, video, data, and everything else to do with collaboration are going to become more embedded within the business.
"Rather than being a centralised business service, UC is going to be an ingredient of everything the company does."
Of course, this new structure presents new challenges. But it also presents a range of opportunities, by giving companies of all levels new ways to interact.
Changes to Collaboration
Continuing our conversation about the way that UC is changing the workforce, Bubley went on to talk about the fact that there have been huge adaptations in the way that people work together. Today, we have things like mobile working, and people have much more fluid locations and roles
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Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis at UC EXPO[/caption]
than they did before. There are different perceptions to consider regarding how collaboration works. Whether business processes are sequential, what the workforce looks like, and more are all going to be determined by personal preferences, and security.
As new technologies progress, some people will still want to communicate through voicemail, whereas others will want more ad hoc meetings, video, and even VR. Bubley explained: "The same things are happening in the consumer space. We all have our own preferences - Snapchat, Instagram, messaging, or calls. Those home applications are going to merge into the business world too."
The functions and apps that we recognise as "consumer" products are increasingly becoming a part of the business space too. There are informal ways of communication,
