The communication industry has changed in a number of ways over recent years. Not only is there a variety of new technology solutions to choose from, but the kinds of vendors and service providers on the market are changing too. As the space continues to evolve, it’s going to be tougher than ever for organisations to make sure that they stand out from the crowd.
One of the groups evaluating the communication space today, and helping to guide companies towards success, is Cavell Group. A knowledge business known for its ability to repackage information from the market into actionable insights – the Cavell Group, delivers information to over 500 service providers across North America and Europe.
Dominic Black, a senior analyst of the Cavell Group, told us that from the events the business runs, it has access to over 650 decision makers around the world. “We also come from a service provider background and act as a consultant. We know how these companies run.”
What’s Happening in the Market Today
Dominic Black
Through deep-rooted connections in the communication market, insightful research and a hands-on team of forward-thinking individuals, Cavell Group is helping companies to better understand the industry. Dominic joined Cavell at the start of 2013 as a UK market analyst and has built a significant knowledge of the UK and European Cloud Communications market since then.
“Lately, people are looking at new and different ways to innovate and communicate. We’re seeing some significant transformations happening not just from a telecoms perspective, but from a developer point of view too. People are searching for new ways to interact with both customers and internal colleagues. One particular growth area has been in the contact centre. As consumers demand more from businesses, we’re seeing a rise in the things that call centres can do.”
What Are the Opportunities and Threats in the Marketplace?
According to Dominic, there’s a lot of opportunity in the market right now. “In all the markets we look at, none of them are over 25% penetration for the cloud. Even moving from on-premises to a cloud solution is an opportunity. Then, there are added options available if you look for ways to add solutions on top of that move to the cloud. Resellers can develop new ways of working for companies, explore collaboration solutions and drive digital transformation.”
Black noted that modern resellers have opportunities available in delivering “holistic” communication solutions to enterprises. However, the industry is still being “held back,” because service providers haven’t been properly incentivised to sell the cloud.
“I think the biggest threat for traditional vendors is going to be from CPaaS going forward”
“Embedding communications into workflows really will be the future of communication. If you want to try and sell to enterprises today, then you need to understand how these systems work, and how everything can integrate.”
In Dominic and Cavell Group’s opinion, communication needs to be embedded, seamless, and easy to work.
What Are Your Predictions for This Year? (2019)
Dominic believes that one of the biggest opportunities for 2019 will be in the API economy. “People who can build bespoke integrations for their customers are going to thrive. I think apps will continue to grow in importance, particularly for those who need access to call and contact centre features. People today want to understand how their people are interacting and communicating.”
According to the Cavell Group, there’s also a lot happening in the collaboration space too. This is something we’ve certainly noticed over the last year or so. Dominic noted that groups like Microsoft are already delivering an excellent balance through the combination of Microsoft Office and Teams.
“What’s happening in the collaboration space is going to be fascinating to watch. There’s a lot going on between the different collaboration vendors out there”
In terms of general predictions throughout the entire marketplace, Black commented on the continued consolidation and acquisition in the communication space. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of acquisitions happening, both from smaller companies scaling up, and large organisations scaling out. “I also think that AI will start to become key components of new solutions too, but maybe not this year – that might be something that we see more of in 2020 and 2021.”
Article taken from our 2019 Market Guide – download it here
