Today, we’ll follow our annual tradition and make some predictions for what will happen in 2014, starting with “old business” to suggest what 2013 trends will continue into the new year, then moving on to a couple of items that could start afresh.
Expectations for Consumerization, Video, Contact Center, and SBCs
Last year, we saw dozens of announcements on cloud-based video, and we think that while the video conferencing and collaboration market will continue to grow in 2014, so it is probably time for some consolidation here. In the meantime, we think that cloud-based video conferencing services will fight hard to differentiate themselves, and we expect to see notable marketing activity around cloud-based video services. Demand for mobile video communications will continue to grow; we still hold to our position that within the next 4-5 years we will see more “video minutes” between mobile devices than “voice minutes.”
The consumerization of IT, most visible in the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend, will also continue this year. However, we think that the easy ability to personalize consumer devices (especially via apps) will start to have an effect on how business applications for these devices are developed and positioned. Since many business apps for mobile devices must be integrated with a cloud or premise based enterprise infrastructure, we see increased participation from these infrastructure suppliers in “personalization for business.” Look for OTT players like Vonage or Skype to play a key role here as they seek to differentiate their business UC portfolio, followed by premise based solution providers, with traditional network service providers lagging. Lync will also play a key role in personalization.
The past year saw several contact center portfolios enhanced, but most of these came from premise-based solution providers. Cloud-based, full scale contact center solutions are likely to follow but we’re not sure traditional service providers are quite ready to offer unified communications and collaboration services via a managed contact center solution quite yet. Rather, pieces of contact center features will be more likely.
We saw a wave of session border controller (SBC) and application server upgrades in 2013, and we expect the next steps in 2014 will be improved interoperability between competing solutions. This will be especially critical for enterprise-to-enterprise network designs that support inter-company UC ecosystems.
WebRTC, Net Neutrality and Mobile UC Trends
We’ll wrap up our annual predictions for the coming year with a look at WebRTC, the possible implications of a net neutrality ruling, and mobile UC trends. Beginning with WebRTC, we admit that the support and momentum for this protocol in 2013 took us a bit by surprise, so it escaped our predictions last time around. This year, we expect WebRTC standards to be ratified, so that will put pressure on bystanders like Microsoft to either support, or justify why they cannot. We predict that Microsoft will eventually embrace WebRTC, although it may take more than a ratified standard to move it into motion.
Voice and video communications are the two most likely beneficiaries of WebRTC, and we do expect to see multiple products for consumer to consumer and (to a lesser extent) business to consumer apps and content that take advantage of WebRTC in 2014. However, WebRTC will remain a supplement and not a substitute existing business communications protocols, implementations, including SIP-based VoIP systems and services.
Sometime early this year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule on net neutrality, deciding whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has the authority to require Internet providers to treat all Web traffic the same. If the court rules in favor of the initiatives the FCC has undertaken, it could continue to undermine efforts to offer a “class of service” based Internet tier that allows anyone to pay for guaranteed quality of service on a public Internet connection. We believe that such a tier could enhance use of video and video conferencing over the Internet by substituting for the usage caps now in place created to restrict heavy video users. However, while we cannot promise which way the appeals court will rule, we can almost guarantee an appeal to the U. S. Supreme is likely in 2014, and the ultimate decision may be thrust back onto the U. S. Congress to sort out.
Finally, we share our thoughts on the topic of mobile UC. The demand for mobile devices to support unified and communication will continue to grow, and we will see some evolutionary advances. For example, we will see HD voice supported on mobile devices; however, interoperability with landline-based VoIP and even on competing mobile-to-mobile services will be rocky until further work is done in interoperability. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) will also face interoperability issues with existing UC platforms, requiring a gateway to translate between public and private voice systems.
When it comes to mobile video, we’re already on record with our predictions that we will see significant growth here, and we think that programs like the “sponsored data” tier introduced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by AT&T is only a start of disruptive packaging that can further the advance of mobile data.
And speaking of CES, we’ll cover some CES highlights including the AT&T announcement on sponsored data in our next edition.
