Mark Herbert, President and co-founder of Qunifi, is predicting a year of change in the unified communications channel this year. Below, he talks through what he expects to see over the next 12 months. Qunifi's flagship services are Call2Teams and Carrier Automate.
How do you think Microsoft will affect the telecoms market in 2022?
We will see some big changes in the market over 2022, primarily driven by Microsoft, which has ambitions in voice, UCaaS and CCaaS. It is reasonable to expect that Teams may in the future become the number one UC provider.
Microsoft’s plans for the UC space have yet to take full effect.
Operator Connect for Teams will further disrupt and disintermediate the voice channel in 2022. Customers can now buy direct from operators, through the Teams interface; they don’t need a partner to support them with the purchasing process. This brings greater competition at the operator level, as customers can purchase from multiple vendors.
This will have a knock-on effect on SBC and basic Direct Routing providers. With customers using an Operator’s central connection to Microsoft Teams, the need for customer-dedicated SBCs will reduce. SBC manufacturers will have to think carefully about how to secure their position. Direct Routing is here to stay though, as any level of customisation ‘in the call path’ or value-add (such as CCaaS) sits firmly outside of Operator Connect – for now.
Whether businesses take Operator Connect or a large UC platform to deliver the telephony via a Teams endpoint, depends on the channel moving its mindset towards the cloud.
From Microsoft, I think we will see a consolidation of Teams in 2022. I think we will see them joining their other products into their Teams solution beyond the Office 365 suite, such as AI and Dynamics, making Teams less siloed.
How will market dynamics be affected?
In 2022 we will see all UC providers gain, probably at the expense of on-prem. The move to hybrid working is further driving the decline of the on-premise PBX. Channel providers that are anchored to delivering on-premise equipment need to consider how they respond. And in the UC space, we could see some consolidation, through acquisitions and mergers, so reducing the number of players in the market (we have already seen a few in the last couple of months).
