The COVID-19 pandemic has confined each one of us to our homes. Businesses, corporations, governments, and institutions around the world are using Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) solutions to connect employees, partners, customers, people, and society. UC&C has evolved over the years. This article is an attempt to collate both the existing and forthcoming technological advancements in UC&C. Also, it looks at how these changes are improving the businesses and lives of people.

Back in the 1800s, when Antonio Meucci first invented the telephone and later when Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for the telephone device, few would have imagined that one day technology would advance to the skies and that one can transmit visuals and text as well, creating an immersive experience of virtual reality that we experience today! 

To understand the evolution of UC&C, we must start with Analog Telephony. The voice converts into electrical pulses, and calls route using switchboards. PBX (Private Branch Exchange) was invented in mid-1900s for businesses to route internal calls, thus saving cost. 

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Do you remember those movies of the 60s, 70s, and 80s which showed classic telephones with a rotatory dialer and the loud “tring tring” sound? 

Next transition came with digital telephony, in which voice converts into non-continuous electrical signals instead of continuous electrical signals. This improved the capacity, quality and cost of the network. As this technology matured and the telephone systems with this technology became commercially available, the telephony became affordable to both business and residential users. 

The late 1970s saw the introduction of PBX systems in businesses. It Improved features like music on hold and call transfer feature was added. A desk phone at each workstation in office formed the real time channel for communication.  

The 1980s saw Voicemails, IVRs, PCs, Email being introduced into office spaces. This is the era when office had two separate networks. The telephone network for phone connectivity with features like Voicemails, IVRs and Local Area Network for connecting PCs with features like Email for communications 

The 1990s saw the advent of video codecs, broadband services (ISDN) and so on. Webcams that trigger video conferencing solutions emerged. In the late 1990s VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) came into prominence. VoIP provides phone service over the Internet. It led to a series of technological advancements like SIP (a protocol/standard for communications). SIP-enabled the creation and deployment of feature-rich services that go beyond simple IP telephony phone calls.

2000 to 2010 – In this decade, VoIP started gaining popularity. Businesses transitioned from traditional circuit switching networks to IP networks for telephony, video, and data communication services, thus easing the life of IT admins. The admin did not have to maintain a separate telephone and LAN in the new converged network. 

The Industry saw the emergence of Instant messaging applications for chatting. Later, presence capability was added. It helped to know if the other party is currently available, busy, or away. With web-based meetings, content sharing, audio, and video conferencing was made possible. In a way, we saw unified communication and collaboration through the unification of IP telephony, video, messaging, and meetings. 

During this phase, companies tried to integrate telephone and email on cell phones. This unison of telephone and emails in cell phones has been the USP of the erstwhile Blackberry mobile phones. It became popular amongst top executives for corporate email connectivity, thus enabling them to be productive even when they were on the move. 

On the desk phone side, some revolutionary changes happened. From the initial days of hard buttons to the present-day soft key phones that invoke call features, we had desktop soft phone clients for telephony. In the later years, the soft phone evolved to a unified endpoint for telephony, voicemail, enterprise grade video, meetings, and messaging.

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2010 to 2019– The UC&C solution was historically deployed as an on-premise solution by large enterprises. To tap Small and Medium Businesses, the UC&C vendors partnered with service providers to provide hosted collaboration solution offerings where end customers invested only on the endpoints (phones, soft clients). It left the UCC Infra deployment, maintenance, and manageability overhead to service providers. 

With Cloud gaining prominence, organizations started their digital journey migrating data center businesses applications to cloud to benefit on scale, cost savings and new features. On the UC&C side, “as a Service” model which includes UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service), VCaaS (Video Conferencing as a Service), CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service), hardware was moved outside the enterprise and the UC&C applications were available on a per-usage basis. 

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We saw vendors offering hybrid solutions, while having a secure on-prem system. They used cloud for specific (new) features and services. While they mostly used cloud systems, on-prem devices were used for better (video) experiences or investment protection. 

As voice, video, meetings, and messaging converged, we saw emergence of a unified collaboration app that made remote collaboration easier than ever. Through this collaboration app, one can make voice and video calls, create group spaces for focused discussions, perform one-on-one messaging, host or join meetings, and also securely share screen or documents with people within and outside the organizations. You can install unified collaboration app on any device like cell phone, laptop, or tablet. This is because people across the globe can engage real-time using the unified collaboration app. 

2020 and beyond–We are seeing AI (Artificial Intelligence) integration in UC&C. We are experiencing the AI benefits in Customer care solutions for faster customer query resolutions. AI helps to preserve human time to resolve complex issues and thereby provides incredible customer experience and operational efficiency. The UC&C world has new capabilities such as noise cancellation, custom virtual background, live meeting transcripts, language translations and so on.  

Analytics is paving the way for a single pane of glass for IT admins to get device usage, feature usage statistics and simplified management of UC&C Infrastructure. 

As the workforce is going mobile, it is essential that the distributed workforce must stay connected all the time. An integral part of this connectivity is the transition to 5G, which will revolutionize mobile high-speed connections and also the performance and capabilities of collaboration tools. Imagine starting a call through an application on a computer and switching over to a phone to continue the conversation. This exchange requires a shift from a WiFi network to a cellular network, and users may experience a minor interruption. 5G will prevent these disruptions by enabling users to stay on the same cellular network throughout the duration of the call. 

The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced everyone to switch to remote working. During these testing times, UC&C has become the lifeline to every sector in the Industry. This includes online education, knowledge workers, healthcare professionals, service Industry, newsrooms debates, government offices, global conferences and so on. This has led to massive adoption of UC&C solutions worldwide. Seeing this market growth and also considering the potential to grow further, we are seeing a surge of UC&C players in the market.  

UC&C has a bright future. It is here to stay and grow.