If 2014 was the year of instantaneous voice communication then 2015 is the year that unified communications is “going mainstream” according to Ovum Research. And it’s not just for the large, global Fortune 500 companies. As workers bring more consumer technologies into the workplace and demand to accomplish as much on their mobile device as they can on their desktop, it’s becoming even more imperative to tie all these communication platforms together in a seamless way. Even small businesses are realizing it’s costing them more not to have a unified communications solution.
I had the opportunity to speak with Glen Vondrick, global sales team leader for ConnectSolutions, on the phone recently. ConnectSolutions delivers more than 7 billion minutes worth of communication and collaboration to everyone from General Motors to the Department of Defense, the world’s largest deployment of unified communications with more than 1M users.
The company’s looking forward to 2015 as the year in which unified communications would really experience a “coming of age” and “standardization” that has not been seen in recent years as small businesses and teams begin to embrace unified communications as a valuable resource in company growth. In essence, the solutions are coming out of the workplace and into the desktop.
Some of these solutions include Adobe Connect, Microsoft’s Lync (which will soon become Skype for Business), and GoToMeeting.
“Companies like [ConnectSolutions] are going to be huge contributors to unified communications adoption”
Some of the trends ConnectSolutions has observed over the years include how different departments in corporations have embraced different offerings for their services, which has led to some fragmentation in many companies. CIOs are looking to fix this situation by standardizing and consolidating unified communications solutions across the board and work with any device at any time.
Some of the reasoning behind the fragmentation in the first place have fallen under “performance, reliability, bandwidth, and compatibility concerns,” and ConnectSolutions is one such company that wants to take whatever product is chosen and make it work in the cloud without those issues.
“Companies like [ConnectSolutions] are going to be huge contributors to unified communications adoption,” Vondrick said.
It’s true that calling and messaging apps rule the consumer market, but if these predictions prove true, in the world of business in 2015, unified communications will be king.