Keeping Abreast: Industry News

It started informally. Something I did casually for myself and a handful of regular clients. But now, for about a year, I’ve regularly published a monthly, opinionated recap of industry news called TalkingPointz Quipz. Below, you can link to the most current report.

Recent issues have focused on the multiple, rapid transitions that Enterprise Communications is undergoing. These changes are not always obvious because so many aspects of enterprise communications never change. The perception of slow innovation is a holdover from the old days when innovation was throttled due to the Bell monopoly, the depreciation schedule of expensive equipment, and to some degree human nature.

Today, competitive cloud forces are creating a Cambrian explosion of new ways to communicate. Freemium services, the browser, app stores, and the Internet itself are all reducing barriers to new technologies.

Now that I’m a hawk on the news, I see these transitions more clearly. For example, in the past year, workstream collaboration went from a future-of-work concept to an inevitability. It was featured in most of the keynotes at Enterprise Connect 2018, and none of them offered an explanation of why the emerging application (team chat, workstream messaging) is worth considering.

A shift is occurring, also, in the concept of cloud. Not long ago, it just meant an offsite, hosted service and included private clouds. Then it seemed that only public clouds were clouds. Today, it appears that a microservices architecture is a necessary component of cloud.

Other recent observations have included:

• AI is creeping up in stories more broadly and more frequently than I expected. AI is all over communications including natural language processing (chatbots and speech technologies), video recognition, virtual assistants, contextual relationships, and more.
• The term UCaaS simply translates to UC as a service. But UCaaS is expanding beyond a delivery model. UCaaS now regularly includes conferencing services, sometimes CPaaS services, integrations and integrated applications, and rich analytics and reporting.
• Conferencing has emerged as a critical component of collaboration. It’s where everything intersects, including at-work and remote staff, premises-equipment and cloud services, content sharing, digital whiteboards, digital transformation, mobile devices, PSTN and Internet, AI, proximity detection, security, and more.
• Crypto-technologies are steadily working their way into enterprise comms. In addition to blockchain messaging solutions, the distributed architectures provide increased reliability. Fee-based services, in this case to pay miners, can also reduce spam and other forms of communications clutter.
• WebRTC has largely disappeared from the news, but AV1 will likely emerge soon to replace and revise the promise of free video.
• The physical endpoint is dead, as conversation has also largely disappeared. Phones will likely continue a gradual decline, but their death was exaggerated. This is realistically true for voicemail and fax, too, though they are rarely in the news anymore.

Each month, I also include in the report a sample of recommended articles, which provide an interesting glimpse into the trends. The upcoming April recap, for example, has lots of articles on privacy and Facebook.

If you would like to download a sample Quipz report, you can do so here.