Two waves of changes have cemented cloud communications as a core capability for enterprises in only a short amount of time, and now a third wave is on the horizon. In 2005, eBay acquired Skype for US$2.5bn. This triggered an uplift in interest and investment in cloud communications companies, and the start of the industry’s wave one.
Wave One: Emergence of Cloud Communications
Immediately after the eBay deal was announced, Five9 raised its first venture round of US$12.5m. RingCentral responded with its own funding raise in 2006. Thinking Phone Network, later renamed Fuze, and Nextiva were both founded later that year while 2008 saw the emergence of Twilio, and Google jumped in with its launch of Google Voice in 2009.
“The demand for IP-based services became too great for global carriers to withstand,” explains Matt Brown, Bandwidth’s International Vice President of Product. “This gave rise to a whole new category of players that simply bridged the gap between the old world of the legacy PSTN, and the new world of IP-based communications. And none of these players relied entirely on their own telecoms infrastructure. This was the origin of the communications infrastructure-as-a-service (CIaaS) industry, the first wave.”
Companies born in the cloud-native era who built on CIaaS had a tremendous speed advantage over the rest of the market. Zoom, which was founded in 2011, went from founding to IPO in under eight years as did Twilio, established in 2008. Compare that to the 13 year journey for Five9, started in 2001 and 14 years for RingCentral, founded in 1999, and the impacts of CIaaS, and wave one, are clear.
Wave Two: Integration of CIaaS and CPaaS
There was a short break before the industry gathered itself for the second wave of cloud communications which became apparent in 2016. A key milestone was the acquisition of Nexmo by Vonage which enabled Vonage to assemble three key capabilities for a leading communication platform.
“Vonage created a one-stop-shop for global service,” adds Brown. “Then, it vertically integrated the network, CIaaS and CPaaS layers giving customers a protocol agnostic solution. Finally, it horizontally integrated the platform to incorporate both voice and messaging capabilities, giving customers an omni-channel experience.”
Carrier-grade network, global footprint, protocol agnostic platform and omni-channel experience have become the new minimum requirements for a leading communications platform. “This represents wave two, and we are at the tail end of it today,” Brown says. “The first half of the next decade will be dominated by the unbundling of UCaaS and CCaaS platforms, which were legacy wave one constructs, in order to fill the gaps with best-of-breed solutions as enterprises look to compete on EX and CX as core differentiators from wave two.”
Wave Three: Rebundling into Verticalised Solutions
Looking to the future, Brown predicts, “The following half decade will see the rebundling of CPaaS and CSaaS into verticalised solutions, that use commoditised components at the CIaaS and CPaaS layers, while bringing together the right software components to offer an integrated solution for a specific enterprise demographic,” he continues. “Wave three will see the unbundling of legacy wave one dynamics of UCaaS and CCaaS within the enterprise. Enterprise leaders will then look to shift their entire communications stack to the cloud by using best-of-breed technologies to build differentiated enterprise and customer experiences. Orchestration and consolidation will become the key value drivers. As wave three crests, we will see the rebundling of cloud communications into verticalised solutions that target the needs of specific market segments, such as healthcare or financial services.”
from UC Today https://ift.tt/RlBOyiP
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