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Keeping Microsoft, Cisco in UC&C Driver's Seat
With Amazon's seemingly bottomless pocket to bankroll its UC&C push, Microsoft might be forced to accelerate the integration story between Skype for Business and Teams. For Microsoft, this accelerated integration would impact the server side as well as the client side, with a likely introduction of Teams as the new end user-facing client for Skype for Business.
When it comes to the third-party app/extensibility story, Slack's partner add-on story is much deeper and broader than the Microsoft model, although Teams is built with extensibility in mind, and it trumps the slow-developing Cisco Spark story. However, if Amazon ends up building a new app from scratch, it would also need to start fresh with its partner model. Depending on the final Amazon play, Microsoft would either find itself in the driver's seat or needing to double-down in its efforts of wooing third-party apps to support Teams.
Bots are another big part of the team chat story, with Slack, Spark, and Teams showcasing different forms of artificial intelligence to assist and further the team chat workflow. Cisco, and Microsoft especially, have much more compelling AI stories and assets already woven into their UC platforms and will likely continue to lead even after acquisition and market dust settle. Most importantly, the continued competition will further benefit customers by driving additional attention and investment in AI by all three vendors.
On the hardware front, Microsoft and Cisco continue to champion leading stories, even with the recent consumer infatuation Amazon Echo has garnered. Both companies will likely be able to keep their strong leads in hardware through internal development and in partnership with UC&C ecosystem partners like Polycom, Plantronics, AudioCodes, Jabra, and others. However, if Amazon continues to show signs of UC&C market share gains, the ecosystem players could easily begin to prioritize their newer devices to enable Amazon compatibility and embrace Echo.
Another consideration here is Microsoft's and Cisco's contact center stories. This remains an area where both Microsoft relies on third-party support, while both Cisco and now Amazon have their own in-house offerings. Although this is a side-story focus from the main Microsoft/Cisco vs. Slack differentiators, it will certainly be interesting to see which vendor ends up with the best team chat-call center integration story.
Other Key UC&C Market Issues to Consider
And for "everyone else," Amazon bolstering its UC&C presence would essentially convert the team chat market into a big-three race among Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco. All other team chat offerings on the market would struggle to offer a tightly integrated enterprise UC&C story to support them. Should Slack remain a standalone company, team chat apps are still going to face a tough road of ahead. What's fact is that the UC&C market over the past two years has seen a flood of funding and new products, leading to increased competition as well as ongoing consolidation and change.
A final point must be made around adoption rates. Microsoft and Cisco have initiated strategic shifts to their respective UC&C cloud platforms (vs. on-premises). This change has forced enterprises to re-assess their UC&C cloud-adoption strategies, and overall UC&C enterprise adoption has slowed.
Looking forward, the mainstreaming of team chat may cause a further short-term slowdown as customers stop to assess Amazon as a new key UC&C player, and evaluate how much weight to give team chat as part of their overall UC&C strategic roadmaps. While this team chat contemplation won't materially affect the major vendors, it may further accelerate market consolidation as the pace of new and renewal contracts slow down in the interim.
Amazon's build-or-buy actions are still speculatory, as are any rumors of other buyers eyeing the team chat platform, yet the winds are certainly shifting and change is coming to the industry. The coming year may well prove to be the UC&C industry's most interesting yet.
