Could AT&T finally be making the right moves in IP/Unified Communications?
No Jitter and Enterprise Connect/VoiceCon regular Lisa Pierce has a blog post at UCStrategies that sheds some light on AT&T's emerging Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS--it's about time) strategy.From the very beginning of voice over IP, the industry has watched the big carriers to see whether they'd embrace the rapidly-developing technology, and come up with something compelling to replace legacy Centrex. For the most part, the carriers stumbled, and saw their Centrex customers flee to a CPE strategy based on IP-PBXs. Every year at VoiceCon, we'd run a session on "IP Centrex" or whatever it was being called that year, and every year we'd hear mostly hot air and promises from the carriers.
Lisa sees promising signs in the latest moves by AT&T to get more aggressive about UCaaS: She notes that AT&T is positioning itself to deliver hybrid UC services to customers struggling with a highly diverse vendor environment. Furthermore, "AT&T has a huge installed local and LD voice base, and so UCaaS is of significance to all of them, and to anyone else who might be interested in using their services going forward. Over time, the potential margin upside for AT&T is tens of billions of dollars."
She includes a few caveats as well. Check out the whole post.Could AT&T finally be making the right moves in IP/Unified Communications?
