
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Joe White, Chief Technology Officer, Brightlink
Big Changes Ahead in Enterprise Telecommunications
Digital transformation will continue to be a key element of
the corporate narrative over the next few years and omnichannel communications
will be a vital part of this discussion. Yet while bots, voice-enabled
integration, artificial intelligence, and the rollout of 5G are white hot
topics, there is still room for changes in other areas of the communications
stack with the opportunity to have a significant impact for businesses. Here
are our predictions for the years ahead.
The phone is not quite down and out
Digital transformation efforts have pushed the importance of
the telephone down in many omnichannel integration efforts. Yet while many
companies are looking to disrupt the industry with chatbots, digital assistant
integration (think Alexa or Google Home) and other emerging tech, the telephone
is far from down and out. What we observe from our customers is that the ease
of procurement for cloud-based solutions coupled with robust data analytics and
availability of single-use phone numbers now enable the phone channel to match
other digital channels for visibility into sales and marketing ROI.
Let's finally put the SMS short-code out to pasture
One area that is well past its prime is the SMS short code.
Technologically it just makes sense to part with this relic as we're well
entrenched a text-native world, particularly for the millennial generation. Customers
are already more likely to interact with a "bot" vs. a human on the main
corporate, support or sales toll-free or local phone numbers, so it's time to
take it to the next level as we can now easily text-enable any telephone number.
Enabling business texting on native numbers will take the burden off the
customer and provide a more powerful and personal form of communication for
sales and service interactions.
Bots and AI are truly
impacting SMS in a significant way
Since we're on the topic of bots and SMS, 2019 and 2020 are
poised to be the years of significant integrations of artificial intelligence
and "bot" features into business SMS. This will begin with the integration of SMS-linked
interactions that are currently funneled and tracked through other sales
tracking and data analytics tools (think CRM and marketing automation products).
Most early use cases from customers are simple keyword-driven parameters that
rules-based rudimentary or narrow AI will satisfy. But this will grow and
mature as dictated by both the results achieved and advances in AI capabilities.
AI will also drive an increase in A2P messaging
interactions
Application-to-person (A2P) messaging is a useful resource
with a plethora of legitimate uses from emergency notifications, corporate
confirmations, etc., but businesses are still struggling with how to
incorporate A2P in a less "spammy" way. This is another area where artificial
intelligence can help. As content
filters from communication service providers increases in sophistication, the
share will shift from lower-quality traffic to more meaningful use of A2P
messages.
We're at least five years away from full-scale adoption
of Rich Communication Services in the U.S.
Rich Communication
Services (RCS) is a way for carriers to deploy a more engaging platform like
we've become accustomed to with the like of iMessage and WeChat. However, in
the U.S. there are significant industry road blocks at multiple layers. Without
more incentives to drive success and pace of adoption, it's highly unlikely we
will have a clearer path to full adoption of RCS.
Self-procurement of services will be the norm
Businesses will continue to face talent shortages in key IT
departments but thanks to the combined experience of a global SDN providers
coupled with robust CPaaS solutions, more organizations will be able to reduce
the IT burden of provisioning services. Expect to see automated near-real-time provisioning
of IP ports, delivering instantaneous voice and messaging services all without
ever having to engage an internal engineer or sit on a provisioning conference
call.
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About the Author
Joe
White, CTO
Joe
is the Chief Technology Officer and has been with Brightlink since its
inception in 2009. Joe built the original Brightlink network, and his
organization is responsible for sales engineering, network engineering,
information technology, and product development.
Prior
to Brightlink, Joe spent 10 years in other lead technology roles including
Commvault, where he led the team of sales engineers in the Southeast designing
complex data protection solutions, CTS/Agilysis, where he was a lead sales and
service engineer for storage and data retention solutions for Dell EMC
customers, and Troutman Sanders, where he was a senior systems engineer and a
Microsoft certified consultant.
Joe is a technology thought leader in the
industry and has been a speaker at key industry events such as ITExpo. Under
Joe's leadership, Brightlink products have garnered numerous technology
industry awards including TMC 2018 Customer Product of the Year, CIO
Applications 2017 Top 25 Unified Communications Solutions Providers, and TMC
2017 Tech Culture Award.