Writing on his blog SIP Adventures, telecoms industry veteran Andrew Prokop discusses how his opinions on the future of UC have been shaped by conversations with his youngest son.
First, he tells the story of a discussion they had about email. Prokop, who admits his entire working life is more or less built around email, is dumbstruck when his son tells him he doesn’t need email – because he has Facebook.
After his son explains why, Prokop realises Facebook offers people of his son’s generation “an immersive experience” in communication email cannot match. With pictures and video, he knows what his friends are doing before he even sends a message.
Prokop goes on to relate that his son barely uses a PC anymore, finding his smartphone sufficient for all of his communication and web surfing needs. But what really interests Prokop is the fact that his son also hardly ever uses his smartphone for the purpose it was nominally designed for – making calls.
“Voice is his last choice for communications,” writes Prokop. “He would rather tag a photo than dial a telephone number.”
As a telecoms professional who spent a fair chunk of his career battling with the complexity of packet-switched protocols to ensure voice worked effectively over IP, you might expect this to be a sobering revelation. But Prokop is sanguine.
“The point of all this is to say that unified communications continues to evolve, and you can’t look at it in the ways you and I once did,” he says. “The Millennials have redefined what it means to share information between two or more people.”
Opportunity
If Prokop is correct, and, like his son, Millennials are eschewing voice for a more “immersive experience,” this is an opportunity for UC. Rather than focusing on how to perfect the unification of voice, video and messaging, UC specialists are best placed to focus on the wider integration of personalised comms tools with the real time information updates young digital users value.
Enterprise may not be yet ready to follow. VoIP is still far and away the most dominant force in the business telecoms market, and industry analysis consistently predicts its continued rise to the end of the decade. Future Markets Insights, for example, has the global phone-to-phone market trebling to $45bn between 2012 and 2019, driven largely by corporate subscriptions, which will more than double.
Such figures may seem to contradict Prokop’s point. But one, they are only predictions. Two, it is logical to expect enterprise tech to lag behind consumer trends.
Through social media and smartphone apps, the Millennial generation has made UC a major phenomenon in consumer lifestyles. But it will be the generation behind them, natives in this new world of integrated, immersive communications where smartphones are not used as phones anymore, which really drive change when they reach working age.
#Kudos to Andrew Prokop – a great insight worth sharing.
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