Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Eugenia Corrales, SVP, Product, ShoreTel
Unified Communications: Five Predictions for 2017
As
UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service, continues to expand, both
globally and into the enterprise, the technology is maturing and meeting
broader business needs. Some of the changes that I expect to see in
2017 follow.
1. The mobile workstyle will dominate in the enterprise. This October, mobile traffic surpassed
desktop traffic for the first time. In the workplace, there is no doubt
that the employees are becoming increasingly more mobile, and will go
to their mobile device first to perform business functions. There is
still broader functionality on the desktop, but it is becoming a
secondary device to conduct business functions. This behavior is
driving technology development and adoption on the mobile device first,
followed by desktop and web clients. While the desktop will continue to
be an important work tool, workloads will be moved to mobile-based
applications more than ever and new functionality will appear mobile
first.
2. Businesses will start integrating Generation Z. Generation
Z will enter the workforce this decade, so businesses need to address
the changes in workstyle that this new generation brings. GenZs grew up
with a constant communication stream, extensive content sharing and many
options for receiving their content. Their expectations are high for
tool performance; while patience and loyalty to non-performing
technologies are low. GenZs know they have options in productivity tools
and will pursue them quickly. Businesses will need to be even more
responsive to technological changes, and provide more flexibility and
interconnectivity than ever as GenZs drive new services into the
workplace at an ever increasing rate.
3. Rise of digital assistance and bots in the workplace.
We will see more companies taking advantage of bots to create stronger
contextual awareness and improve the speed and accuracy of decision
making in the workplace. Leveraging the increasing amount of customer
data and improved analytical tools, bots can produce tangible value in
decision making. Some interesting use cases include contact center
applications and sales enablement tools.
Companies
such as Chyme and Kore are developing bot technology specifically for
the workplace. For instance, Chyme's bots help workers in contact
centers quickly determine the customer's problem by identifying patterns
of previous customer behavior. Kore's Smart Bots
can help retailers automatically figure out if certain merchandise is
in stock, via a simple messaging platform. Bots will continue to
infiltrate the workplace enabling businesses to obtain tangible value
from evolving big data analytics and machine learning.
4. Increased integration of the collaboration stack. IDC predicts
that by 2019, 75 percent of IT spending will be driven by third
platform technology: cloud, mobile, analytics and social media-based
services. This transformational technology shift brings several
interesting characteristics to productivity and collaboration tools in
the workplace. In the collaboration space, end-users are gaining
decision power in the enterprise, placing greater value on ease of use
and overall user experience. Hence, best-in-class solutions are giving
way to more integrated and holistic solutions that eliminate integration
and compatibility issues. We will see growing partnerships and
consolidation in the marketplace as vendors shift to focus on creating
the best full stack solution rather than a standalone technology. IT
spending for integrated collaboration stacks will continue to grow as
companies forgo point solutions with integration challenges.
5. Greater relevance of global markets for UCaaS. The global unified communications and collaboration market is predicted
to top $35B by 2019. UCaaS first emerged in the US as the cloud
infrastructure and the technology matured. Regions outside of North
America are now starting to take advantage of the technology. Within the
UCaaS market, the majority of growth and adoption will spike in markets
outside of the United States. In particular, Europe, Asia Pacific and
Australia are starting to deploy UCaaS solutions now that the technology
has been vetted and the needed infrastructure is in place. We'll see
the entire balance of power shift in the UCaaS market as Europe and Asia
Pacific begin to adopt the technology at a faster rate.
UCaaS
technology is starting to live up to its full potential as the
technology matures and the worldwide infrastructure fully develops.
Adoption for more integrated solutions in increasing in the enterprise
as end-users place greater value on user experience and tangible
productivity gains. The expanded capabilities of mobile and analytics
combined with a more technology friendly workforce will continue to
accelerate UCaaS adoption.
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About the Author
Eugenia
Corrales joined ShoreTel in July 2015 as Senior Vice President of
Solutions Group. 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.