The Next Act: Stage Set for Business CommunicationsThe Next Act: Stage Set for Business Communications

As our industry continues to evolve, so too must the terminology used to describe technologies, markets, and so on.

Some terms once the key focus for vendors and IT buyers are out of fashion, while new monikers (and of course, acronyms!) are now part of our lexicon. Terms and technologies that didn't exist a decade ago are now standard fare – from IoT, to huddle rooms, contextual collaboration, and, of course, bots and anything with "smart" in front of it.

While the PBX was the star of the show for a long time, its time in the spotlight has come to an end. Most businesses no longer look to purchase a PBX, as they can get PBX functionality in more modern ways. Most vendors, consultants, and resellers I speak with agree that they no longer have conversations with customers about the PBX. While still in early days, embedding communication capabilities into applications, workflows, and business processes is becoming the new preferred method of communications. With ubiquitous mobile devices, more and more interactions start in a mobile app or mobile browser.

The key question is: What happened to unified communications? UC was the darling of our industry for the past decade, but is it still the star of the show? Is UC a has-been? The answer is" "Yes"... and "No."

A Bit of History
Let's start with a bit of background and history. UC, as we know, premiered around 12 years ago, when Microsoft, Cisco, and others introduced products and platforms that supposedly tied together various communication modes. The idea was to integrate call control; instant messaging and presence; audio, video, and Web conferencing; and basic mobility (find me/follow me, etc.), all from a single user interface on one vendor platform. At that time, the UCStrategies team defined UC as "communications integrated to optimize business processes."

We identified two types of UC approaches:

Most vendors and enterprises focused on the end user or personal productivity aspect of UC rather than the business process integration piece for various reasons. Notably, these include the complexity involved, the need for professional services, and the lack of business process expertise.

Vendors also soon found that they could easily prove and quantify the return on investment of the UC platform's collaboration capabilities. For example, businesses were able to identify the cost savings of using Web and video conferencing compared with traveling to a meeting, as well as the ability to use the UC system's conferencing capabilities rather than spending additional money on a third-party conferencing service. With the collaboration element of UC providing the largest hard-dollar benefits, vendors began highlighting the value of collaboration. Many vendors (and analysts) began using the new term, UC and collaboration (UCC), while some vendors tried to differentiate themselves and dropped the UC part and just used the term collaboration.

Continue to next page: An expanding stage, a new audience, and saying hello to business communications

Continued from previous page

An Expanding Stage
In the past few years, more and more tools and technologies have been developed and embraced by businesses to help them better communicate and collaborate. Recently we've seen the introduction of "team collaboration" (or workstream collaboration) applications. These applications can be standalone and separate from UC (Slack, for example), or can be part of an overall UC solution (Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, and Unify Circuit, for example). Most of the UC vendors have added team collaboration to their portfolios either through acquisition or in-house development.

Beyond UCC, the stage also now includes IoT, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that are playing a huge role helping businesses communicate more effectively, and we've gone way beyond the bounds of what we can consider UC. Contact center or customer interaction is another area that has close ties to UC but isn't considered part of a UC solution. We're seeing an increasing number of ways in which customer interaction and UC are coming together, but the two are still separate technologies and markets, with a different set of buyers and decision makers.

We've also seen communications platform as a service (CPaaS) take off, fulfilling much of the promise of integrating communications with business processes and applications through the use of APIs. Twilio; Cisco Tropo; Nexmo, the Vonage API platform; and others have made it easier to communication-enable applications, and are changing the market dynamics. While there's a great deal of overlap, CPaaS is not UC, nor part of the UC umbrella.

A New Audience
A key point to note is that the buyers for communications tools and technologies have changed. Once upon a time the telecom department was responsible for purchasing the PBX and phones. In the age of VoIP, that responsibility expanded to include the CIO and the IT networking department. As communications becomes part of the workflows and applications used in various verticals or business functions (as my colleague Marty Parker likes to call usage profiles), line-of-business leaders are replacing CIOs as the primary decision makers and buyers. In the CPaaS world, developers are the target audience. Even the buyers and decision makers for contact center technology have changed, as roles and titles such as chief customer engagement officer and VP of customer experience emerge.

These new players are less interested in technology, and more interested in outcomes. As the sales conversation changes, we need new terminology and discussion points. The term UC neither resonates with many of these new decision makers, nor is universally understood by them. It's time for a change.

Saying Farewell to UC... Hello to BC
While UC is still essential for most businesses, it's time to close the curtain on the term unified communications as an industry description. We need something broader, more encompassing of the tools and technologies we have today and will have in the coming years.

To that end, the UCStrategies team is reframing the conversation and using the term "business communications" (BC) to describe our ever-evolving market (note: some readers of a certain age may recall No Jitter's print predecessor, Business Communications Review). In support of this, we changed our name and website from UCStrategies to BCStrategies. We'll be moving this new narrative forward in our upcoming No Jitter posts, featuring several members of the BCStrategies team.

Business communications is a broad term we define as:

UC, collaboration, mobility, customer experience, communication-enabled applications, IoT, AI -- all of these are part of business communications.

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Our industry has clearly been going through an evolution, and the stage is now set for business communications.

BCStrategies is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.