Dave Michels, industry analyst and expert with TalkingPointz, recently spoke with UC Today about what 2024 has in store for the enterprise communications world, exploring how the meeting room vendor landscape might shrink, the ever-growing prominence of mobility, and how RCS will challenge and potentially even supplant SMS as a dominant form of B2B or B2C communications.
Here’s what Michels anticipates will happen this year:
The Microsoft Meeting Room Space will be Consolidated
Michels’ first prediction is that the Microsoft meeting room space will be consolidated.
“Maybe consolidate is the wrong word, but the vendor landscape will become smaller,” Michels added. “I don’t think demand will go away; in fact, it might even grow, but Microsoft has added a lot of vendors over the year, in part to meet their global demand.”
“However, they added Cisco in late 2022 and then throughout 2023, Cisco has been building up that capability of all of their room systems. Cisco has added a lot of sales capability and a lot of global reach, and I think they’re going to take a lot of that market.”
Michels expanded, noting that Cisco’s growth in room systems has put considerable pressure on some of the vendors in this space.
“Some vendors, like HP Poly, will bundle,” Michels predicted. “But other vendors that can’t bundle will feel that pressure and either withdraw from that market or be acquired, and we’ll see some consolidation.”
Mobility’s Continuing Rise in Importance
Michels’ second prediction is that mobility will continue to grow in importance, both on the UCaaS and carrier side.
“Last year, I talked about UCaaS Mobility 3, where the UCaaS number becomes the native number on a cellphone,” Michels said. “We’re going to see that trend in rising popularity.”
“On the UCaaS side, we’ve got Microsoft, Cisco, RingCentral and Reach,” Michels added. “On the carrier side, we’ve got a lot of carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, BT, Swiss Telecom, and many more, particularly on the Microsoft side. So, I think we’re going to continue to see UCaaS Mobility 3.”
RCS Will be a Significant Player in Mobility
Michels’ final prediction for 2024 is that RCS (rich communication services) will, after years of hype, finally and decisively take the world of mobility by storm.
“It’s taken us a long time to get there, but now that Apple is supporting RCS in the iPhone, we’re going to see a lot of interesting RCS use cases,” Michels explained its reasoning. “This will be great for the CPaaS space, and we’re going to see a new world of B2C communications and rich messaging.”
“For example, an airline can send a boarding pass via SMS, whereas now they send a link via SMS,” Michels concluded. “So, now they can send rich formatting, we’ll see them send a lot of tickets and notifications, a lot richer formatting for B2C communications.”
