Predicting the future in a fast-moving environment like UC is always a challenge, but RingCentral’s SVP of Operations Curtis Peterson, has a good overview of what we can expect from the year ahead, and is even prepared to glimpse a little further into the future
This insight is rooted in trends observed projected from the cutting-edge of the present, and this forward-looking perspective is what led RingCentral to a key role in the upcoming UC Summit. As Peterson explained, online events are going to increase in importance, as the rate of innovation increases:
“There are always a couple of key events where the networking is more important, but then there are other areas where it’s about knowledge transfer and the exposition of experts.”
With big marketing events like MWC (Mobile World Congress) planned out so far in advance, there’s no real breaking news reveals, they form part of a roadshow showcase repeated over and over. While on the other hand,
“Virtual events [like the UC Summit] are the opposite, where you get the technical, intellectual and engineering participation — the people behind the marketing message”
The cloud shift is accomplished
And digital event networking is just one aspect of the shift to a fully cloud-based, subscription-based, world of business. In 2020, we don’t need to be selling that idea in any more, decision-makers understand.
“Other than appropriate due diligence by security teams, we’re no longer having discussions about what the cloud is and why you should be there. It’s now a non-existent conversation”, Peterson continued.
A similar done-deal is the explosion of remote or location-independent working, at least so far as startups are concerned — while legacy businesses may own their real estate and find their remote shift driven by HR motives,
“it’s a foregone conclusion at this point that any startup doesn’t go out there and shop for large capital spends, whether for comms or anything else”
Peterson sees the as-a-service model increasingly spreading through the business planning cycle, from software to hardware to every other cost centre which can be scaled down to a per-user model.
And of course the work-from-anywhere ability is also being fuelled by improved universal connectivity — a trend still unevenly distributed, but anticipated to make great strides in 2020 and beyond.
Peterson reminds us, “Remember what it was like to go from 3G to 4G?… I don’t think 5G is overhyped in our space. It’s the associated ability to combine communications with other processing and data events, that make 5G a transformative technology. In 5 years time we’ll be discussing a different world, in terms of what we do on broadband and remote… In fact, I wonder if this is the kind of technology — like broadband itself -that becomes a digital right, as opposed to just the latest tech.”
So perhaps in a very short time, we’ll no longer have to have the conversation about connection speeds and bandwidth, in the same way as we are now pivoting away from any necessity to talk about where our data and apps reside. Continual universal access to everything from anywhere, will bring us truly unified communications and collaboration — in a future that is exciting to look forward to.
