Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Eugenia Corrales, Senior Vice President, Product, ShoreTel
2016 Predictions: The Future of Unified Communications
Business leaders and CIOs alike are increasingly prioritizing business communications across the enterprise, leveraging Unified Communications (UC) services as a key platform to lower their costs, improve flexibility and provide stronger productivity.
Unified Communications as a whole is gaining momentum. Adoption is at an all-time high as organizations are realizing the value of integrating the growing number of communication methods, such as chat, video, file sharing and conferencing. Laptops, mobile phones, tablets and even the Apple Watch are being used as communication devices for business.
The continued proliferation of mobile devices and Big Data will impact the market offers across the whole IT market, including UC. We will continue to see the growth in new and expanded cloud-based applications, with more distributed and open architectures. Looking ahead, here are three predictions on the Unified Communications market.
UCaaS Goes Up-Market
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) will additionally continue to grow at a much faster rate in organizations and vertical markets than the rest of the UC market. 2016 will also be a year of global and mobile workforces which will drive greater demand for globally available UCaaS solutions. This “as-a-service” model provides organizations greater flexibility to manage their capabilities as they grow.
Contact-Center-as-a-Service Takes Off
The growth of CCaaS will allow businesses to turn on and scale a contact center quickly. Contact center agents will add functions beyond voice and email, adding capabilities such as chat, workgroups and analytics. In 2016, the demand for omni-channel customer support will continue to put demand on businesses and e-commerce sites, as we see the importance of proficient enterprise-class contact centers in the cloud to improve the customer experience. With highly cost effective contact center technology available today, small to medium businesses will take advantage of capabilities that were not practically available to them before.
Integrated Collaboration Goes Mainstream
We will see more businesses looking for integrated collaboration tools that enable a natural flow between instant messaging, phone and conference communications, video as well as desktop and file sharing – without the need for opening multiple applications and remembering multiple passwords. New collaboration capabilities that enable virtual work groups to share and store more and more information will continue to proliferate. As these new collaboration tools go mainstream in 2016, some will demonstrate enduring business value, and others will go unexploited. In their continuous search for productivity, we will see organizations moving beyond application integration to more powerful collaboration tools integrated with their communications platform.
##
About the Author
Eugenia Corrales joined ShoreTel in July 2015 as Senior Vice President, Product. She is responsible for the ShoreTel product roadmap, product management, product development, and product quality as well as the network infrastructure for the ShoreTel hosted solution. Corrales is a tech industry veteran with over 25 years of experience in developing innovative products, establishing business development capabilities, and building operational excellence.
Before joining ShoreTel, Corrales was VP and General Manager of Cisco’s Computing Systems Group, a multi-billion dollar business unit. Prior to that, she was responsible for business development, strategic planning and operations for Cisco’s Data Center Group. Other leadership roles include CEO of Nanosolar, CEO and co-founder of Sunmodular, VP of Engineering for SolFocus, as well as VP of Product Operations at Cisco. Corrales started her career at HP as a process engineer and later ran the High-Availability NT server program. She holds a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Grinnell College.
