2020 Vision – Channel Predictions: Unified Communications

Our Channel Predictions this week turn to Unified Communications and the pace of innovation around collaboration, a vital ingredient for productivity. Rob Smith, COO of Unified Communications at Nuvias, sheds some light on important trends. 1. Accelerated Convergence of IT & Telecoms 2020 will see the synergy between and merging of traditional telecom and IT […]

Our Channel Predictions this week turn to Unified Communications and the pace of innovation around collaboration, a vital ingredient for productivity.

Rob Smith, COO of Unified Communications at Nuvias, sheds some light on important trends.

1. Accelerated Convergence of IT & Telecoms

2020 will see the synergy between and merging of traditional telecom and IT platforms accelerate, delivering further improvements to the user experience. There have been some great examples of this already with the integration of services such as Dropbox and Zoom, which delivers cross-platform features to facilitate real-time communication around shared content. We expect the integration between IT and UC vendors to continue to evolve at pace. To take advantage of this, we also expect to see a rising number of traditional UC service providers and resellers including IT services as part of their offerings, to increase the value to their customers and adopt a more diversified portfolio approach. This will drive the continued demand and need for automation in the supply chain, in the context of the procurement, enablement and management of these new services.

2. Continued Strong Growth in Attachment

There is a lot of talk in the communications market around cloud, as-a-Service, IoT and 5G technology. However, in many cases, particularly in the unified communications market, there is often the need for an endpoint to consume and take full advantage of the advances in the capabilities of a cloud service. We expect to see a continued and strong growth of UC endpoint attachment, such as headsets and handsets, to consume the ever-evolving cloud services. To expand on this, we expect to see massive growth opportunities in 2020 for video and collaboration, as it becomes mass market. Customers are demanding a more complete UC experience, and this coincides with companies like Zoom, LogMeIn, Cisco and others making it easy to use and deploy their services, while companies like Poly and Yealink are offering much more affordable customer-premise equipment to attract the mass market. This coming year will drive strong growth for unified communications and collaboration endpoint attachment.

3. Virtualisation & Cloud Adoption

For many years, traditional telecom vendors have been focused on delivering their software, which can offer telco-grade performance within a virtualised environment and more latterly, within a cloud-native architecture. A lot of service providers have already transitioned their service environment across to a software-only architecture, where some have started to leverage the public cloud. We expect to see a greater adoption of public cloud infrastructure from the likes of Oracle, Google and Amazon to host telecommunications services to support both geographic expansion and network architecture evolution. The technology advances from the public cloud providers and the traditional telecommunications vendor space is starting to enable cloud native architectures to be fully harnessed and take advantage of capabilities such as automation and on-demand scaling.