Last week (March 7-10), it was the Enterprise Connect event at Orlando (Florida) and Kurmi Software was there! Keynotes, General Sessions, meeting partners, customers, techno-vendors and competitors… very busy and interesting week for us.
Our first feedback is that Unified Communication is synonymous with cloud, cloud and cloud! Microsoft Office 365, Cisco Spark, Avaya Zang but also all UCaaS offers from AT&T, 8×8, Fuze, RingCentral, Verizon, Vonage … All keynotes were focusing on that subject. UC is now really deployed more with an end-user point-of-view (user-centric) and services instead of a technical and architecture approach.
UCaaS answers market trends such as mobility and enabling remote workers, but also easily enables collaboration (meetings, instant messaging, video, screen sharing…) with external contacts and others companies.
However, there is still no interconnection between solutions! If you are using Cisco Webex for your webconference, your attendees will have to connect to WebEx… If you are using Skype Meetings, ditto… So we still need to use a lot of different solutions and so different ergonomics. Not the best to facilitate user adoption and simplicity!
Another key feedback, is that when looking forward  in more details and customers trends, everything is not moving to the cloud, especially for large enterprises. To maintain control, assure high availability and quality, they are more thinking about hybrids solutions than migrating everything in the cloud… An example of best of breed would be:
Basic voice features still on premises based on proven and robust legacy call servers
Collaboration in the cloud to simplify, accelerate user adoption, with the latest features available
(an always up-to-date solution)
Finally, a rich ecosystem to improve and complete those solutions are still needed: devices, assurance/monitoring, call accounting and management. Looking closer to user management: migration, hybrid solutions and ecosystems confirms and strengthens the need of independent and multi-vendor management solutions.In conclusion, the playground of Unified Communication is still moving, faster and faster with the generations Y and Z entering the labor market. New challengers are also proposing really disruptive approaches and prices. But there are also so many things to confirm, to improve, that the next years will be very exciting!
We at Kurmi Software, strongly believe that our BCOM (Business Communications Operations Management) solution is positioned at the crossroads of these new trends, usages and players to help both enterprises and service providers to reap the benefits from these tremendous changes.
Please contact us to find  out more about us and set up a full presentation of Kurmi solutions.
