AI, IoT, SDN. All of these acronyms and no direction. But for success within the global unified communication & collaboration market (UCC market), they may be the most important letters in your business — according to corporate technology research firm Frost & Sullivan.
Their latest Global UCC Industry Outlook 2018 suggests that cloud-based solutions have “up-ended the traditional sales, purchase, implementation, and support models. Frost & Sullivan expects customization and user adoption to be keys to ensure UCC solutions deliver significant user and business benefits.”
Related: IoT Best Practices in 2018: the State of the Internet of Things
Services will rise to 66 percent revenue share of the $39 billion UCC market in 2019, as software, platform and endpoint revenues continue a steady decline.
The global user base of cloud UCaaS, among the fastest growing segments, has surpassed 43 million, with net new users estimated to grow at a healthy compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2016 to 2023.
“Providers’ future success will hinge on addressing the customer’s need for customized, reliable and flexible solutions; reducing costs; and improving productivity,” says Robert Arnold, Industry Principal, Conferencing & Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan.
Here’s 5 ways integrators can earn bigger UCC market share according to Frost & Sullivan:
- adopt as-a-service-based solutions and cloud services
- integrate UCC with office productivity software
- focus on hybrid solutions & intelligent networks
- develop mobile solutions support
- diversify video capabilities — both content creation and content management
“Progressive solutions such as AI, software-defined networking (SDN) and IoT are slowly making their way into enterprises, most of which have disparate networks, protocols and interfaces. For smaller organizations, these technologies may appear unattainable,” says Arnold.
“Providers must recognize where most customers are in their readiness for such advanced capabilities and lay the necessary foundations for adoption. Security and privacy concerns, coupled with unclear IT strategy and managing multi-vendor solutions, will also need to be addressed.”
