Cloud Providers Push Toward Unified Communication

By Cara Daly, Sr. director of product marketing, Vidyo

2021 will likely bring a rush of cloud solutions providers looking to make a larger impact in unified communications. While streamlining some business processes is great, cloud providers will look to become a one-stop-shop for workplace solutions moving forward. 

A look back at 2020's impact on cloud solutions

With the 2020 exodus from the traditional office, organizations had to adjust rapidly to the pressures of supporting a remote workforce. They turned to cloud-based collaboration technologies to enable their business. Even IT organizations who traditionally deployed infrastructure on-premises found themselves having to burst capacity to the cloud to cope with an unprecedented spike in demand overnight. The pandemic forced even the most resistant employees to overcome barriers to fully adopting UC technologies to stay relevant in a work-from-home environment. The ramp-up of UC adoption enabled organizations to maintain a connected, productive, and informed workforce.

How UC will impact 2021

In 2021, the UC client will transform into the central hub for productivity by integrating with as many 3rd party applications as possible to cater to multiple personas and use cases (for example, sales, developers, call center agents, and more). Differentiation in the UCaaS space will depend not only on the number of features but also on how easy they are to use, the onboarding experience, how you can brand it, how you can deploy it, and how easy and profitable it is to resell it.

We will see a bifurcation of the UC market in 2021. Vendor consolidation at the top end of the market will continue to be a trend (for example, the Salesforce acquisition of Slack); however, smaller and nimble channel players will look to bring more bespoke solutions to the market. In order to capitalize on the underserved needs of the SMB and specialized verticals, these channels are seeking technologies that offer deployment flexibility, branding, a healthy margin, and a straightforward process to add customers and onboard the final users.

Driving change

Until now, relatively few UCaaS vendors have offered an extensive API framework that allows their SMB and vertical customers and channel partners to build their bespoke clients on a multitenant cloud. Even less support use cases where their customers want more deployment choices, ranging from private cloud to hybrid and on-premises. Customers and channels will consume API's to take branding and the workflow experience to any level without any restrictions. These use cases will provide areas of opportunity in 2021.

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About the Author

Cara Daly is the director of product marketing at Vidyo. With over a decade in UC&C industry, Cara has covered a diverse cross-section of technologies, including video collaboration, embedded video, video content management, and immersive telepresence. At Vidyo, Cara leads the ongoing evolution and go-to-market for Vidyo’s collaboration and customer engagement solutions.