The best way I can describe 2021 would be "Crazy". At the same time, I spent quality time with my family after a very long break. I will be looking forward to 2022 for peace of mind and work life balance. I am sure you agree with me. With crystal ball in my hand, I foresee following top 8 UC predictions for 2022, I believe all you great minds reading this space concur with me.
- Work from Anywhere and Anytime
This applies to working from the office, at home, or anywhere in between. This trend gained momentum in 2021. It has caused a revolution in the way we work. We saw a significant increase in employee productivity while also providing the flexibility to work at any time.
Employees will be able to spend more time with their families because of this. The businesses have already adapted their workplaces to this new culture. Work from Anywhere is expected to continue in 2022 and is the future.
Working at any time is also likely to become more common in the workplace. This new phenomenon will be delivered by UC, which will enable teams to manage their own schedules. The pandemic has enabled many businesses to abandon the constraints of the 9 to 5 workplace in favor of a more agile mindset. Giving teams more freedom will benefit organizations that get the culture and technology mix right.
- Accelerated Innovation
We saw an acceleration in innovation for collaboration tools from industry-wide UC vendors in 2021, such as noise cancellation, transcriptions, and language translations., Immersive modes and many more. We will see a continuation of innovation in 2022. Three noteworthy developments that will have an impact in 2022
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- AR, VR, MR enabled collaboration – Microsoft and Facebook recently announced Mesh and Metaverse, which will add AR, VR, and MR technologies to Collaboration, respectively, where participants will be represented as avatars to make meetings more immersive, engaging, and fun
- Asynchronous Video - To give employees more freedom to maintain their own schedule, Cisco and Slack announced their Asynchronous Video features called Vidcast and Clips respectively
- Virtual Events Platform – In 2021, the virtual events platform is widely used in trade shows, summits, town hall meetings, religious services, and family functions. More capabilities will be added to the virtual events platform in 2022 to make it more engaging with the audience. Cisco, for example, introduced Slido – Q&A – Polling in Webex, as well as Socio, an events platform.
- Employee Wellness
"Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to," famous Richard Branson quote from 2014. The statement from Virgin Atlantic's founder has a lot of meaning, and it should undoubtedly be the driving force behind every organization. 2021 was the year of Great Resignation where organizations from every sector of the industry witnessed its workforce quitting which costed organizations millions. The real economy is not only about dollars, pounds, euros its fundamentally about the employees. We already get to hear that teams are facing meeting fatigue. Organizations have realized that employee safety, health, wellness are essential and are taking steps in this direction. For instance, Cisco implemented meeting free days, “a day off for you”, flexi timings, no meetings at certain hours.
For UC vendors, to succeed in this new world, they must play a role in enabling better employee experiences. We can see UC vendors are implementing features for safety, inclusion, and well- being. This helps UC apps to be positioned as the office social network, connecting and empowering employees in the work-from-anywhere culture. Offering wellbeing insights within the future UC app could be the key to improving work-life balance and keeping employees happy and healthy
- Levelling the Playing Field
By moving out of the office and rethinking how we collaborate, we've inadvertently discovered a slew of ways to make work more inclusive, equitable, and supportive of diversity. Back in pre- pandemic days, we always had introverts who kept to themselves, non-expressive, followers taking in commands and an extroverts who were dominating, talkative, commanding this culture was authoritative and lacks extracting best from every employee. The remote working with effective UC collaboration tools has truly levelled the playing field for everyone. Each employee can openly express his/her views and participate wholeheartedly in the meetings for teams to make informed decisions. We will see this trend continuing in 2022 and beyond
- Journey to Cloud Continues
In early 2000, Amazon followed by Google and Microsoft introduced the cloud computing services to the world for rapid development, deployment, and execution of software services by developers and enterprises. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) came to prominence in 2014, on the heels of the Cloud computing movement to provide enterprise communications as a service to businesses from SMB to an enterprise. UCaaS adoption was very slow in the beginning, as technology evolved enterprises are seen gaining trust on UCaaS for its economies of scale, reliability, agility, security, and innovation. Due to pandemic in 2020 and 2021 we saw enterprises investing more on UCaaS, migrating their collaboration real estate from on premise to cloud. In 2022, we will get to see more of this
- UC Security, Privacy and Compliance
As collaboration workloads migrate to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to prevent data breaches, respect and protect employee-customer-user PII data, and comply with federal and regulatory requirements. On Dec 9th, 2021, security researchers discovered a zero-day vulnerability involving remote code execution in the software library Apache Log4, code named Log4jShell. NVD has given a maximum CVSS severity rating of 10. Log4j is used across millions of instances, both on-prem and cloud worldwide and potentially a sizeable portion of it is vulnerable to the exploit. Experts say it can lead to leakage of sensitive data. Given this, security will remain a top priority to the UC vendors and they will continue to invest heavily in Zero Trust security and will follow security considerations to protect their clouds, networks, and end point
- Composable Enterprise
Market transitions are occurring at a faster rate than ever before, and customers' expectations are at an all-time high, requiring contextualized and personalized experiences. Businesses need agility to respond to these changes more quickly, which is where Composable Enterprise comes in. Collaboration has a significant role to play in Composable Enterprise. CPaaS – API is helping integrating communication capabilities into business applications. An article published here describes how Slack, the messaging platform giant, has aided HSBC in speeding up the software development and incident management.
With no-code and low-code applications and integrations, customizations are becoming more common. Workflows with contextual information are enabling smarter experiences and increased productivity. In the future, UC vendors will need to invest in developing marketplaces that provide users with ready-to-use integrations for all the critical apps they use daily.
- Sustainability
The world started witnessing the drastic effects of climate change due to global warming. A new and disturbing high temperature record for the Arctic of 38 degrees Celsius (just over 100- degree Fahrenheit) was confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). In 2021 we saw extreme weather events like Drought, Heat Waves, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Wildfires at several places on the earth resulting in the loss of many lives, damage of crop and properties in the millions and loss of livelihood for several people.
The world leaders pledged to be carbon neutral with their revised target dates at COP26 which requires ambitious policies to attain these targets. We have seen many firms committing to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. In 2022, we will see Sustainability, reducing fossil fuels and use of renewal energies will be at many companies’ agenda. Even if world fully opens, we will see people cutting down on their travels and instead use collaboration tools to meet their office and business commitments thus reducing carbon emissions
Closing Statements
According to an interview given by Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist International Monetary Fund (IMF), the global economy continues to recover with growth projections, but the momentum slowed in 2nd half of 2021 compared to the 1st half of 2021. Reasons for this is the delta wave and supply chain disruptions and the uncertainty has shot up with a new omicron variant, high inflation in many major advance economies of the world and unfortunately, we are entering a turbulent phase.
As we can see the travel restrictions, lockdowns are coming back though everyone believes that it won’t be as bad as Mar 2020 when the pandemic first stuck. Due to this the services sectors like travel, hotels, theaters, sports events will continue to see slow growth while the goods would see a greater demand and growth with people ordering online. As we look forward to 2022 and beyond, the remote and hybrid working would stay and unified communications and collaborations tools will continue to play a crucial role in recovery of global economy back to the pre-pandemic days
