Trends For the New Year

Hope you’ve had a good start to the new decade. Ever since late December, magazines and blogs have published thousands of articles summarizing 2009 or perhaps the whole decade. Instead, lets focus on the days and months ahead. What are the technologies and trends that will shape our communications world in 2010 and beyond?

Cloud-based Communications– The notion of delivering communications capabilities via the network as a service will be a major market force as the customers will continue to demand OPEX based solutions. Vendors will “jump in” and forge relationships with service providers all over the map. The challenges will be bountiful, with transformations of sales models, delivery model and support. What role will the indirect sales channel serve in a cloud environment? Can it evolve quickly enough?

SIP Trunking – My assumption is that every product release going forward will have been architected to support SIP. The value proposition of managing call control as well as reduce the dedicated PSTN lines (PRI) through SIP is too good for corporate businesses to ignore. This will be the year SIP Trunking will take off and drastically reduce PSTN traffic.

Social Media – No question, social media is here to stay but the applications of how to drive business value through social media has to evolve before corporations will invest more. I believe there will be a huge focus on integrating social media applications with communications and CRM platforms to capture online interactions. The need to define the social media universe into different types of connections and networks based on different context will drive much innovation. An important question for the industry is whether social media vendors can employ a business model that is not advertising funded. I wonder?

Mobility – 2010 will be the year of the smart-phone. Google, RIM, Nokia, Motorola, Apple, Samsung and many other vendors will double down on the smart-phones. With the explosion of apps for anything and everything, the smart-phone will become the computing platform of choice. With already several different ways of integrating and managing call control between fixed line networks and mobile networks in existence, business users will only need one number and one telephone device. My guess is that many “information workers” will opt for a smart-phone device for most of their communication needs.

We will see what happens!!