Over the past years, the key drivers of VoIP in businesses have undergone drastic changes. Skype and IP PBX for instance, have overshadowed PSTN and regular PBXs, dawning the age of UC, formerly known as unified communications.
UC, which allows interoperability between communication devices, has largely expanded the concept of communication. Businesses, installing PBX a few years ago to communicate internally now view it an integral component of their communication. Similarly, hosted communications is being predicted to replace on-premise solutions in coming decade. Let’s see some of the popular terms and trends in communication over the years.
Hot Terms in VoIP – 2014
The following graph shows a comparison between popularity of the referenced terms in 2014 and their lowest level of popularity as per Google trends.
In a scale where ‘100’ means the ‘most’ and ‘0’ stands for the ‘least’, the most trending term based on recent data seems to be BYOD, which means ‘bring your own device’ (like cell phone) to work in contrast to generally accepted terms like ‘videoconferencing’. Another term ‘mobility client’ which means the app that allows mobile devices to gel in with UC system also shows a boosting trend.
The following table shows some of the terms according to their popularity. They have been ranked according to their peak popularity.
Unified communications as a service, abbreviated as ‘UCaaS’ is also one of the most popular terms today. Popularity of UC as a service indicates the world of business is moving to cloud communications.
Recent Shift to Cloud
A few years ago, businesses would spend on a personalized piece of hardware to integrate voice traffic with broadband. This would also require additional spending in experienced IT team. Today, we see all of this slowly being replaced by easy-to-install-and-manage cloud communication.
But that doesn’t rule out the space for on-premise communication systems, especially in larger firms. Nevertheless, smaller and medium sized organizations have more than one reason to seek cloud based communication. What was mostly exclusive to small-mid enterprises is expected to overthrow on-premise solutions. The prediction by market analysts is strengthened from trends calculated for Google Trends.
‘IP PBX’ Vs. ‘Hosted PBX’
‘Hosted PBX’, despite an early peak in 2006, remains fairly stable. IP PBX on the other hand, has fallen and might eventually lose to hosted PBX’s popularity.
Unified Communication in Businesses
As was hinted before, PBX has become much more than a mere tool of cost savings. Today, it has grown so much, most of PBXs offer some sort of UC solution.
UC – despite having changed the prospect of communication within a company – has much work ahead in terms of federated communications, which is communication between two or more companies. Once federated communication sees more attention from businesses, it will immensely improve their ROI by bringing in all suppliers, partners and supply chain vendors under the same roof.
Mobility in UC
UC’s latest evolution comes through mobile devices which have taken the need of hosted solutions to the next level. Now, businesses aren’t bound by a physical phone. The data obtained from Google Trends backs up that the inclination towards mobility clients and desktop UC clients is ever increasing. In fact, people use UC clients 10 times more than their physical desk phones. The compatibility is a key factor for most businesses seeking UC solution.
Have a look at the following timeline.
UC Features – Top Terms in 2014
Desktop sharing followed by videoconferencing have been popular trends in the past but both of them are witnessing a gradual decline. On the other hand, terms like ‘mobility client’ and ‘presence information’ who are rather new, are going higher in searches. Another term, which is being predicted to change the future of telecommunications is said to be ‘mobile VoIP’ which will in effect eliminate the need of cellular networks in businesses.
WebRTC – Future of Communication?
WebRTC is also much anticipated API in coming future. This programming interface, which is expected to offer direct communications (video and voice) via browser, might just eliminate the need for other plug-ins or apps. However, the progress has been rather slow despite its increasing popularity since 2011.
Demand for VoIP Security Measures
But there has also been a great rise in security issues in the past decade. This has prompted more people and businesses to seek secure VoIP solutions.
By the way, this does not indicate that improvements are not being made; viable solutions just aren’t as widespread.
SIP Trunking Market
SIP trunking allows quality voice traffic and are also instrumental in cost savings apart from being reliable. SIP’s market ups by 50 percent every year solely because the companies prefer adding more bandwidth instead of lines to cope with their expansion. This growth is also anticipated to continue in the future. Nearly 30-40 percent of organizations consider shift to SIP and if they haven’t migrated completely, there may be room more for prosperity.
End-Notes
PBX is still at large, not only going mobile, but also integrating within itself, a vast array of communication tools. Users are moving more toward PBX as the line between it and UC gets more blurry.
UC clients focusing on integration of mobile and desktop are trendier than those concentrating on traditional features.
Web RTC, once perfected will be one of the hottest communication tools in demand owing to its ability to optimize communication without support form additional apps.
Lastly, with SIP and cloud technology on the boom, businesses – particularly the small and medium ones will be able to expand beyond limits.
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