A couple of years ago, we focused an Enterprise Connect keynote panel on the question, “Is there a new model for collaboration technology?" The idea was that end users’ experience of collaboration technology hadn’t really changed over the previous 5 years, since the point early in the pandemic where enterprises made desktop video ubiquitous. Is there something, we wondered, beyond the talking-head video, Hollywood Squares layout, easy screen sharing, and backchannel chat that characterize the vast majority of knowledge-worker engagement?
Back then, the answers centered mostly around AI and the add-ons we’ve since become familiar with – meeting summaries, transcripts, AI-generated action items. Those features are now available, and have their proponents, but I don't think anyone would say they've fundamentally changed either how we experience meetings, or the role that real-time meetings play in most people’s workdays.
Enterprise collaboration technology – Unified Communications – seems destined for continued incremental improvement and evolution, a view I find confirmed in a new No Jitter post from analyst Irwin Lazar of Metrigy. If you focus just on the idea of “incremental,” that can seem like damning with faint praise, but Irwin’s post also spells out the “improvement” part of what’s coming – and some of that improvement could be emerging from unexpected places.
Metrigy’s research found that enterprises plan to continue investing in UCaaS technology, prioritizing new functionality including integration with adjacent collaboration functions, such as email, calendars, and documents. They’re also looking afield to integrations with office space management as well as AI assistants and – importantly – contact center features.
And though Irwin’s article discusses Metrigy’s findings about UCaaS investments, the unexpected news is a strong sentiment for retaining premises systems or even repatriating current UCaaS functionality to on-site or private-cloud systems.
All of this suggests that UC can and will remain a robust market; that its core capabilities (video, audio, and data-sharing) will remain business-critical; and that enterprises will continue to value the opportunity to implement these core features more cost-effectively and in ways that respond to ever-changing security and governance issues. An additional factor is that there’s no particular reason to believe that wired telephony will disappear from non-knowledge worker environments where it has retained value up to now.
“In our research successful companies tend to revisit their UC approach around every three years,” Irwin writes. “They look at opportunities to improve functionality, expand features, and reduce operating costs, often with an eye toward converging contact center and UC into a single manageable platform.”
In a world where the metaverse is officially dead and virtual reality seems permanently nascent, the fact that the evolutionary path can still produce a healthy market seems like reason to celebrate.
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