UC Roadmap: What's Ahead?UC Roadmap: What's Ahead?

A detailed presentation looks at Mobility, Collaboration, VOIP, and Hosted Communications.

CompTIA recently produced a Unified Communications Roadmap slide presentation, and in the slides they've nailed down both emerging and fading trends in Enterprise Mobility, Collaboration, VoIP and UC As-A-Service, Cloud and Hosted. There are links to each slide in the accompanying sections below (slides reproduced with permission of CompTIA):

Enterprise Mobility
Click here to view CompTIA slide full size

At UC Summit 2013, Michael Finneran spoke about the need for enterprises to put mobility policies and solutions in place, and CompTIA confirms this, stating, "78% of companies do not have a formal Mobility policy in place." Then, read Michael's post: What Is "Mobile UC"? With enterprise users fully embracing mobility, when will enterprise adopt mobile device management?

Collaboration
Click here to view CompTIA slide full size

The remark (2) in the Collaboration slide under "Discussion" reads:

"People don't want to hear about the 'not enterprise class service' or about 'following standards;' they see a similar application and expect the world of 'Star Trek' with universal audio/video/data communications to be real."

Personally, I would love a communicator badge, and yet as a VAR I've delivered networks to customers along with PBXs and infrastructure solutions built upon standards, "proprietary," and open source, all while selling them on "enterprise class" solutions. Interoperability and seamless transparency seem to be expectations. The example used in the slide is BlueJeans Network, an "any-to-any" communication arbitrator.

Standards will remain, just as "enterprise class solutions" will, but surely this means more opportunity for communications arbitrators in cloud solutions. Vendors' claims of being "agnostic" will either be substantiated or blown into the wind of historical irrelevance.

VoIP
Click here to view CompTIA slide full size

Voice is everywhere and the walls of separation between premise focused or cloud-based are always threatening to come down. Will the PBX disappear? When? When will the PSTN evaporate and into what?

In reading Eric's post: The PBX Market: How Bad is it, Really? I believe the reality is that premise PBXs will be around for some time, probably longer than what most are willing to admit. The PBX market won't be as fat, and I do think it will require surgical skills for both manufacturers and VARs to sell and deliver PBXs with specific solutions catering to specific verticals in the SMB. For those that don't home in on key verticals and develop strengths in their solutions, you can count on hosted providers filling these voids, because they are already starting down this path. Hosted voice providers are and have been targeting key verticals such as health care and law, and the good ones are not laying low but instead developing feature sets that their customers demand.

UC As-A-Service, Cloud and Hosted
Click here to view CompTIA slide full size

The notations of "Customer Expectations" in the CompTIA slide are akin to what paid TV subscribers want:

* Ease of Use
* Mass Customization--they don't want choices, they want only what they want

Traditional VAR models of the past are fading, and these old methods of selling must be replaced with new methods of attacking and delivering Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP). Solving specific business problems is mandatory, customization is expected, and this may be challenging to cloud providers attempting to target masses, if those providers lack both customization and pricing strategies to meet expectations.

The same frustration already exists in subscriber TV services; so the warning to cloud providers is, this is where past PBXs excelled--in meeting numerous verticals with those several hundred PBX features that no one likely ever fully used. Will cloud providers be forced into developing more and more features? Then, will PBX manufacturers start to deliver vertical-specific feature sets instead of hundreds of features that go unused by most?

Cloud consolidation through M&As will yield chaos, and proof of this is to just ask the customers of recently acquired providers. Another interesting twist is snom and their offerings--integration with Lync and Lync-certified SIP phones.

For VARs and the channel, new and improved skill sets are in your future now. Specializations into specific verticals are something that I do believe will occur naturally, and this could potentially be a big win. Then, PBX manufacturers and providers that fail to recognize and focus on specific verticals will suffer greater loss. This means delivering what people want in that specific vertical.

PBX prices are already low, and with the right surgical tools put in place for key verticals, I do think that PBXs' lives could be extended and more importantly have a renewed focus. The key advantage is cost, and hosted voice prices still have a long way to drop to compete on a cost basis.

Now, the question of PBX life extends to another player that no one can ignore, and that's Cisco. Cisco, to the surprise of many, has grabbed not just enterprise market share but also the SMB. Then, you still cannot discount Microsoft for the SMB. When and if they could simplify and substantially improve packages and licensing costs specifically aimed at the SMB and develop features targeted for key verticals--then I think the comfort zone of Cisco will erode. The wild card is the telcos. How long will we wait and what will we see from them--if anything other than raising the price for bandwidth?

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