Key trends for 2023 include:
- Economic challenges accelerate companies needs to become more efficient and leaner resulting in greater cloud communications adoption to streamline operations
- Continued unification of technologies and blending of services to create smoother and richer user and customer experiences across voice communications, video-calling and collaboration and business processes
- Democratisation of technology as SMEs are offered cloud solutions that combine capabilities in a way that is affordable and attractive to them
- Mobile-first and fixed-mobile convergence adoption will further accelerate and continue to erode the concept of the traditional office, enabling greater flexibility and productivity
Cloud adoption has powered digital transformation at enterprises over the last few years and this trend is set to continue into 2023, even as enterprises face unpredictable geopolitical pressures and high rates of inflation. Acceleration may slow as markets handle the changes to the worldwide economic environment and the impacts of the war in Ukraine but others will commit more deeply to their transformations as a means to operate more efficiently and address the pressures they face.
“It’s very hard to predict because of the instability in the world,” confirms Bertrand Pourcelot, Managing Director at Enreach for Service Providers. “Inflation could have the effect of furthering acceleration because companies need to become more efficient and leaner, and cloud can help a lot with that. For others, it might be more a case of 2023 not being seen as a time to make changes and to focus on the core business not transformation. It’s therefore very hard to anticipate what 2023 looks like at a detailed level because these two attitudes interfere with each other, but the big trends will continue.”
Pourcelot sees the most significant over-arching trend still being the unification of technologies and the blending of services and service providers in IT, telecoms and consultancy. This adds to the unification of voice communication, video calling and collaboration and messaging plus the integration of these with the contact centre, customer relationship management, enterprise processes and the enterprise resource planning solutions, in what Enreach defines as Converged Contact.
“All of these getting combined is both a vendor wish and a big enterprise expectation,” he adds. “A key question is at what price? Customers want this but they don’t want it to cost them a lot more. That’s particularly important for SMEs as well and we should keep in mind that a big advantage of cloud is to make services available to SMEs that were previously only available to large enterprises who would use integrators and consultants to build combined solutions.”
“A lot of the momentum in cloud in 2023 will depend on the ability of cloud solutions to make this combination of capabilities affordable and available to SMEs,” Pourcelot emphasises. “The key is in how you make such solutions available. You can’t force adoption and service providers have to be careful not to give away something for free that either isn’t needed or could be paid for.”
Differentiation is challenging in this environment but Pourcelot expects Enreach’s approach of enabling service providers with products and services to help differentiate from the big box offerings of the web giants and enable value to be created. “Success here is about how you deal with the ecosystem and the value chain,” he explains. “We deal with partners, dealers, resellers and service providers through Enreach for Service Providers and we see a lot of service providers differentiate through automating processes and making provisioning sleek. They then tune their capacity to adapt by enabling integrations with application programme interfaces (APIs) and that benefits customers and their own businesses.”
Pourcelot thinks that the market has turned a corner in terms of maturity as end users migrate beyond the cloud communications solutions they hastily deployed to handle the pandemic and now look to maximise what they can achieve with effective integrations. 2023 will see the fruits of this reasoned, more carefully considered cloud communications adoption.
“2023 is going to be a year of continuity in digital transformation but that doesn’t mean it will be smooth and slow,” says Pourcelot. “It’s likely to keep on being fast and furious and new capabilities such as transcription of keywords or motion detection are happening now. It is the combination of innovation with greater ecosystem and customer maturity that is driving the market forward but we will see price pressure because of rising inflation. Regardless of whether 2023 turns out to be a very challenging year or not, it will create opportunities for growth, continued transformation and cloud communications adoption. That’s always very exciting.”
