5 Trends in UC and Collaboration for 2020

Unified communications (UC) and collaboration experienced a transitional year in 2019. The shift to the cloud accelerated as leading vendors sent a strong message: products and development are now cloud-first. Emerging cloud-native vendors have become public companies and reported strong growth. Meanwhile, team collaboration took its place at the center of the user experience (UX), and AI began to emerge to improve collaboration functionality and experiences. Here are some UC and collaboration trends to expect in the coming year.

UCaaS Becomes King

According to the Nemertes Research 2019-20 Workplace Collaboration study, 36% of companies surveyed still rely on on-premises UC platforms. Of those companies, 43% are either planning or evaluating a UCaaS migration. For organizations using single-tenant hosted services, 63% are planning or evaluating a potential shift to UCaaS. Increasingly, IT leaders are looking at multi-tenant services to reduce costs and ensure access to the latest emerging features.

Team Collaboration = Work Hub

Most UCaaS vendors now provide a team collaboration experience as the core UI. But only 29% of those surveyed view team collaboration as a work hub. Most organizations still largely view team collaboration as a softphone replacement or just another messaging app. Most team collaboration vendors are trying to expand their apps to serve as a portal for work by providing packaged or low-code/no-code options to integrate workflows into team spaces. Nearly half of the organizations with quantifiable benefits to their collaboration investments view team collaboration as a work hub compared to 24% of those with no measurable benefits. It's clear: adopting team collaboration as a work hub correlates with success.

AI Choices Increase

Only 5% of those surveyed are currently using AI to enhance their collaboration experiences, but 43% are evaluating their AI options. Expect to see a rapid uptake of AI-powered capabilities as they become more widely available in 2020 to improve meeting experiences, enable easier access to relevant information and break down language barriers. However, most IT buyers will continue to see AI as delivering feature enhancements to existing services and not as stand-alone products that require extra cost.

Security, Compliance, Governance

Security, compliance and governance capabilities will emerge as a major battleground for vendors fighting over the cloud market to win larger, more complex customers. Vendors like Cisco are touting security as a major differentiator, while others are adding features to support encryption key management, export and archiving, and analytics to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Expect continued vendor focus on providing highly secure offerings to move the last on-premises holdouts to the cloud.

Empowered Workflow & Analytics

The collaboration software landscape is rapidly changing from point products for meetings, calling and messaging to integrating collaboration capabilities with workflows to improve business processes. The integration of workflows and collaboration capabilities requires a platform approach to deployment and development expertise to take advantage of collaboration APIs.

Low code/no code (LCNC) workflow builders are now entering the market, either natively from collaboration vendors or as stand-alone offerings by a growing list of vendors. IT leaders must shift from a buy-and-deploy viewpoint to one focused on identifying and optimizing specific workflows and enabling users to create their own workflows. Along with this shift comes a need for analytics to identify opportunities for process improvement and measure the results of deployed integrations.

The collaboration market has rapidly evolved over the last year. These predictions for 2020 UC and collaboration trends take those evolutions a step forward. Watch for a continued shift to the cloud, combined with a new focus on using collaboration platforms to deliver measurable business value while ensuring security and compliance.