With 2014 around the corner, it’s time to look ahead at the Unified Communications (UC) industry and predict the overall industry will move over the next twelve months across Operator and Enterprise OTT (over-the-top) solutions.
It’s obvious that increasing prevalence of mobile and cloud will continue to impact all areas of communications and it’s through this lens that we’ll see some of the biggest developments in 2014.
RCS will die as we knew it — 2013 was the year of RCS results or lack of them. Some operators saw limited success or failure—some even decided to pull out of RCS altogether. However, many in 2014 will seek to salvage their RCS investment and focus on Rich Messaging on top of existing services. A hybrid approach that simply means better SMS and MMS services to users.
Operator OTT (a.k.a. One Number services) will continue to grow — Led by Rogers One Number other operators, such as Altibox, BT, Cablemás, China Mobile, FT/Orange, Network Norway, Telefónica, and Virgin Mobile have deployed Operator OTT solutions that effectively compete against Internet OTT solutions such as Skype, Viber, Rebtel, Apple, Google, etc. and provide a New World order for Telecom services.
WebRTC will progress but the hype will die down — 2013 was the year of the WebRTC hype machine. In the end, it does have promise to change facets of the Telecommunications sector but it certainly will not take over the world. However, the reality is it’s still a far way off. The various standards bodies, ecosystem and the Telecommunications sector are still trying to figure out exactly how it will solve a problem. 2014 will see the hype slow and a land grab of vendors trying to force fit their WebRTC solutions to Teleco customers while Internet startups deploy new-siloed solutions.
Client shipments will overtake other IP phone standalone device shipments — Clients running on top of Desktops, Tablets and Mobiles will overtake other traditionally communications endpoints (i.e., handsets) in terms of shipments. This year will see more and more clients being downloaded (yes even more than WebRTC usage) to end devices.
People will start to tire of too many social networks and Internet OTT services — Too many choices is not a good thing and, as users continue to grasp new technologies and services, only those that are attached to a legacy service (e.g., a phone number) will continue to thrive. Voice/Video/Chat services tied to a non PSTN terminating service will decline (think Facebook video).
Enterprise consumer will change business – With smartphones and tablets blurring the lines between work and play, the consumerization of IT will be the norm in 2014 driving the Enterprise OTT solutions on top of BYOD. Every app and service (consumer and enterprise) must feature consumer functionality – easy to install, clearly-defined benefits and little need for backend support. The sustained growth of mobile communications will force IT departments to embrace easy, enterprise-focused app store deployment and plug-n-play usage as means of accommodating mass deployments and managing multiple employees, devices and licenses.
Cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) comes to the enterprise - Deployment and client management is a huge hurdle across all organizations; it takes up resources and wastes money. This is the year that enterprises will finally make a sizable shift from on-premises solutions to a cloud-based unified communications model as a means to increase productivity and accelerates business processes and decision making while lowering costs.
Let us know what you think of these predictions. I wish you great 2014.
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