The Unified Communications market appears to be poised for dramatic change, reminding me of what the US market went through in mid-1980s. It was a period driven by the widespread emergence of the digital PBX, accelerated adoption of digital phones replacing Key Sets "behind" the PBX, and the AT&T consent decree that paved the way for vibrant channel competition. The convergence of these changes lowered costs, introduced new capabilities, & opened up new channels to market, all of which contributed to a doubling of the normal churn in the installed base.
In eerily similar conditions, I see three evolving market segments offering a roadmap, if heeded, to future industry growth based on high value solutions that deliver a new wave of business productivity.
Unified Communications: A Shift in the Core Platform
At the turn of this century, the telecommunications industry was busy laying the groundwork for "real time" communications, from voice and email to SMS and mobile Internet access. The goal was to eliminate latency in alerting, informing, and deciding on critical issues in a distributed & increasingly mobile world. The challenge was to identify, deploy, and manage the most effective set of tools for these people and their roles in these processes.
With the number of tools per user multiplying, the complexity for users to communicate & share data to support a nimble business created inconsistencies in use and capabilities. "Unified Communications" emerged, with the goals of providing a consistent user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types, the ability to send and receive communications across different media, and the integration with business applications through Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP).
What is evolving now, though, is an integration of individual communications services into core business applications, independent of the private network platform. A great example is Salesforce.com integrating real-time collaboration (an application it named Chatter) into its SaaS CRM. As such, the "core" platform is not a communications network, but an application (CRM) central to the user’s role in the company. The key here is to simplify each needed communications service for users within their primary application, embedding tools where the user lives rather than trying to orchestrate separate systems to work together.
The implications to vendors' architectures and integration with partners are considerable, and some are better positioned than others in moving to this new paradigm. Similar challenges are faced by enterprises of all sizes, although defining the value and benefits in this model will typically be more straightforward given the clear enablement of a core business application.
User Access
The explosive adoption of mobile smart phones and the capabilities that come along with them can offer the best viable unified communications access device on the market today. Driven by the ever growing mobile nature of the workforce, we can now leverage any of the UC services through these devices for large portions of users.
Considering growing use of these new services, the role of voice in "real time" communications will continue to experience less importance, particularly outside the call center. This not only means fewer calls, but less reliance on voice calls in day to day business. With this, the critical need for the voice service to be tightly integrated in a private network is also diminished, and makes it feasible to look at more loosely connected services (be it discrete sites or public service) when costs offer savings.
Still, there will always be a sub-population of workers whose role has them tied to a workspace. Low end SIP desk phones, PC client, and wireless devices can drive down total cost of ownership and deliver basic voice services on par with the wireless voice services on the mobile space. As was called for in several of the Enterprise Connect sessions, interoperability is a key to leveraging this option.
A key to evolution in this space is for IT staff to engage each user community and develop a minimum needs assessment (not default to duplicate what is on the desk) based on current roles and needs for each UC service. In most use cases, voice services can be de-coupled and simplified while addressing the corner cases with innovative new solutions.
New Consumption Models & Players
The leveraging of new consumption models such as virtual platforms, hosted services (dedicated & shared), and the growing IaaS / ISV SaaS models offer a wide range of new options in connecting very small to global enterprise users to shared and dedicated services over public and private pipes.
For industry players, these infrastructure and delivery models will offer new access to markets for discrete UC services at scales that allow for entry to small communities of common interest and costs that maintain linear relationships to user growth somewhat independent of customers & site concentration.
The clear advantage in these models is a cost structure that scales up and down in price/performance as the business needs dictate. Sure, there are considerable challenges to use in some industries and with some roles within business, but as these are being worked out, the economics could be a compelling opportunity to shed some of the fixed costs that the current premise models carry.
Conclusion
This isn't a dogmatic argument for open systems, but a recognition that single vendor bundles invariably force each of the services in the bundle toward the highest common denominator, diminishing price-to-value, adding unnecessary complexity for the majority of users, and depressing widespread adoption.
There are certainly challenges to be overcome in all three areas, as pointed out in many of the Enterprise Connect sessions. But over the next 5 years, businesses that fail to tap into these trends will lose ground to nimble competitors, and industry players that do not adapt their strategy to this new environment will lose relevance in the market & be left with a dwindling installed base with which to generate revenue.
