An Expanding Stage
In the past few years, more and more tools and technologies have been developed and embraced by businesses to help them better communicate and collaborate. Recently we've seen the introduction of "team collaboration" (or workstream collaboration) applications. These applications can be standalone and separate from UC (Slack, for example), or can be part of an overall UC solution (Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, and Unify Circuit, for example). Most of the UC vendors have added team collaboration to their portfolios either through acquisition or in-house development.
Beyond UCC, the stage also now includes IoT, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that are playing a huge role helping businesses communicate more effectively, and we've gone way beyond the bounds of what we can consider UC. Contact center or customer interaction is another area that has close ties to UC but isn't considered part of a UC solution. We're seeing an increasing number of ways in which customer interaction and UC are coming together, but the two are still separate technologies and markets, with a different set of buyers and decision makers.
We've also seen communications platform as a service (CPaaS) take off, fulfilling much of the promise of integrating communications with business processes and applications through the use of APIs. Twilio; Cisco Tropo; Nexmo, the Vonage API platform; and others have made it easier to communication-enable applications, and are changing the market dynamics. While there's a great deal of overlap, CPaaS is not UC, nor part of the UC umbrella.
A New Audience
A key point to note is that the buyers for communications tools and technologies have changed. Once upon a time the telecom department was responsible for purchasing the PBX and phones. In the age of VoIP, that responsibility expanded to include the CIO and the IT networking department. As communications becomes part of the workflows and applications used in various verticals or business functions (as my colleague Marty Parker likes to call usage profiles), line-of-business leaders are replacing CIOs as the primary decision makers and buyers. In the CPaaS world, developers are the target audience. Even the buyers and decision makers for contact center technology have changed, as roles and titles such as chief customer engagement officer and VP of customer experience emerge.
These new players are less interested in technology, and more interested in outcomes. As the sales conversation changes, we need new terminology and discussion points. The term UC neither resonates with many of these new decision makers, nor is universally understood by them. It's time for a change.
Saying Farewell to UC... Hello to BC
While UC is still essential for most businesses, it's time to close the curtain on the term unified communications as an industry description. We need something broader, more encompassing of the tools and technologies we have today and will have in the coming years.
To that end, the UCStrategies team is reframing the conversation and using the term "business communications" (BC) to describe our ever-evolving market (note: some readers of a certain age may recall No Jitter's print predecessor, Business Communications Review). In support of this, we changed our name and website from UCStrategies to BCStrategies. We'll be moving this new narrative forward in our upcoming No Jitter posts, featuring several members of the BCStrategies team.
Business communications is a broad term we define as:
UC, collaboration, mobility, customer experience, communication-enabled applications, IoT, AI -- all of these are part of business communications.
As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Our industry has clearly been going through an evolution, and the stage is now set for business communications.
BCStrategies is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.
