Microsoft Teams as a collaboration tool has been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to help support a more distributed workforce due to COVID-19. By May 2020, Microsoft reported over 75 million daily active Teams users, having added 31 million new active users in the month of April alone.
In the Unified Communications and Collaboration space, and even in the VoIP and telephony markets, there is a huge elephant in the room...Microsoft. All signs are pointing to Microsoft being a major player in the space. Collaboration is one of three pillars for Microsoft strategy as envisioned by the new CEO, Satya Nadella. And it is clear that Microsoft is winning a lot of converts.
UCStrategies was well represented at Enterprise Connect 2015, presenting, moderating, and participating on panels.
What did not come out of the Lync Conference was a lot of clarity about UCaaS and what Microsoft is expecting of that channel. Disappointing, but not unexpected. Microsoft has been consistently focused on the premise enterprise deployments. Gurdeep Singh Pall and Giovanni Mezgec made a lot of references to cloud enablement for Lync but the details were sketchy and by context they were likely talking about private cloud deployments of Lync (via HP or the telcos) or about hybrid solutions (similar to what West IP Communications is doing).
The next stage of customer services will be heavily focused on supporting the new flexibility that mobile consumers will have for business contacts with their personalized, multimodal smartphones and tablets. As I have previously suggested, customer assistance will not be initiated with a voice phone call from such devices, but will increasingly be started by a "click-for-assistance" option embedded within an online application or any type of notification message that the customer has received.
In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts discuss the future of the public switched telephone network (PSTN).