Enterprise unified communications (UC) has come a long way in recent years. However, despite becoming a rather mature market overall, there are still exciting developments on the horizon. At 3CX, we are seeing several interesting trends which we expect to continue to drive the market forward in 2017 and beyond.
Businesses of every size are beginning to embrace cloud communications, as they learn how the cloud can help them reduce costs, manage complexity, and improve productivity. According to industry analyst firm IDC, this ongoing increase in adoption is helping to, in turn, drive the adoption of cloud-based unified communications (UC) and UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS), particularly for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
Solution Transforms Legacy Call Centers with Unified Communications and Team Collaboration Integration
The bot space has been changing rapidly. A few years ago, bots were automated chat agents. They would aim at replacing customer service representatives in case of traffic spikes or when all were busy. Very rudimentary, they usually left consumers frustrated. Bots are now enjoying an incredible momentum. As they reach the peak of inflated expectations, one can wonder if it is a temporary fad. I believe bots are here to stay and here is why.
I have been a strong advocate of the web-based transformation that WebRTC will introduce to real time communications. In the UC world, we have seen an increasing number of traditional telecom apps, new UC/Workflow entrants like Spark and Circuit, as well as a range of new applications and integration come into the market with WebRTC. But for the last three years, the first comment that the naysayers have made is that Microsoft and Apple do not support WebRTC.
Just recently announced, open source Project Atrium, which is focused on the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC) RTM SDN use-case specifications, just won Internet Telephony Magazine 2016 SDN Product of the Y
As a tech strategist, planner and consultant I am constantly bombarded with new tech ideas and solutions. Most of the time I find they are just another technology "in search of" a customer or user. To provide really effective solutions, it must solve real-world problems but also have real CFO ROI (return on investment) benefits. Running a call/contact center is a complex and daunting task.
Cisco hosted recent events in San Francisco and regional centers to announce Cisco Spark 2.0 and C
Many organizations depend on ubiquitous and seamless access to real-time applications to communicate, collaborate, and drive business success. Unified Communications solutions like Skype for Business and Office 365 are built to boost productivity and drive down costs, but oftentimes organizations do not get the results they were promised.
Avaya's recent news has overshadowed everything else in the market, but Cisco and Microsoft are very good at staying in the limelight. As it turned out, last week both companies had collaboration updates, and I happened to get briefings on both. Cisco's latest iteration of Spark has been in the works for some time, and with so much at stake in terms of owning the collaboration experience, Microsoft was not going to remain on the sidelines.