Demand for UC has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Zoom now counts 300 million users and Microsoft Teams added 12 million users in a single week, demonstrating how users have embraced UC to keep operations going during lockdowns. However, these are knee-jerk reactions to an emergency situation; what’s really interesting is what happens next.
The pandemic may turn out to have radically accelerated acceptance of cloud-based communications and home working. “The developments we’ll see in the next six to 12 months are what I would have expected to see over the next three to five years,” confirmed Mehmet Hussein, the technical design authority at Voxbone.
“People have been forced to take the first step, which is the hardest”
“They’ve avoided the tidal wave of non-productivity, and will probably look at whoever provided their free trial UC solution first, as they move from managing the crisis to making home working a more permanent option,” he added. “I suspect people that hadn’t used cloud-based services before because they couldn’t see the value, now realise their workforce is remote and they need to find solutions to ensure their workers can talk and collaborate seamlessly.”
[caption id="attachment_26029" align="alignright" width="200"]
Mehmet Hussein[/caption]
However, while organisations have been able to maintain productivity thanks to standard UC apps, they have not been able to access their usual enterprise communications applications and have been working on a best effort basis. This is particularly important for contact centre apps and businesses that require compliance to regulations, especially those that operate internationally.
While connectivity appears to have risen to the challenge of home working, the services supporting global communications have struggled. Many countries don’t have flexibility in their TDM infrastructure to scale with such an immediate demand, including the ability to 'turn it down' if or when the peak passes, thus not being able to support the way enterprise communications is dealing with this climate. In the past this would have meant organisations needed to form relationships with incumbent carriers in each country, necessitating multiple contracts and complex management burdens.
For UC service providers this has meant they can’t offer their entire bundle of services in every market their customers operate in because of regulatory differences and local network capabilities, not to mention the amount of work required to launch new coverage when dealing with legacy providers in different languages to their own. For enterprises, there’s no guarantee that the multi-national carrier they select will be able to support all the products they want to use, specifically in terms of the ability to make local calls with all the same features that you get from working with a in-country operator.
