Editor Ian Hunter reports from Cavell Group’s third European VoIP Summit, held in London last month. He found an event that was well attended by service providers that contained key messages for the channel.
Two years ago I attended Cavell Group’s inaugural event, David Dungay went last year so this time it was my turn again. I was looking forward to it and was not disappointed.
Cavell Group has forged a fine reputation as an analyst firm in a very short space of time and as well as their ongoing focus on the market adoption of IP communications services, throughout 2017 they are also focusing on the following key market areas.
Digital Transformation
The analyst says that you cannot pick up a business magazine today without people talking about how digital technologies are being used to disrupt and create new markets.
“We believe the communications industry should be at the heart of this transformation, and indeed should be looking at how this transformation can change their own businesses. This will continue to be a key focus for Cavell following on from our recent ‘What does CPaaS mean for Service Providers’ research and market report.”
The summit included a useful panel debate on the subject entitled ‘Who will Run the Communications Platform of the Future?’ with panellists including Genband the provider of the Kandy.io CPaas platform. CPaaS is going to become increasingly significant for a channel going down the route of embedding contextual applications within customer applications and many case studies were covered.
End of the PSTN
We are now starting to feel the impact of announcements from providers around the world; how successfully incumbent operators make the transition from ISDN to SIP will have a large impact on their future business. For the channel this opens as many threats as it does opportunities and we cover this in far more detail in our SIP trunk article in this issue.
Role of The Service Provider
In the last 24 months, we have seen the traditional industry supply chain rocked, as all major Platforms have launched their own Cloud solution – Mitel, Avaya, Broadsoft, Genband, Microsoft, etc. Staying relevant in the channel is therefore a hot subject for many business owners as they explore the real capabilities of these platform providers to operate as a Service Provider and indeed what the Service Provider’s future value will be?
Customer Interaction
An area of recent focus has been how enterprises maximise customer interaction. Cavell says this has led to both a large focus on dedicated and integrated contact centre capabilities, as well as analytics and recording are now moving from the contact centre arena into the wider enterprise.
This is an area where in the last 12 months we have seen a lot of market focus. Team Messaging and Collaboration applications such as Slack have seen tremendous growth and have been joined in the market with the recent announcements from Broadsoft, with Team One, and Microsoft Teams.
This, together with customer interaction excellence are cornerstones of a digital transformation.
Cavell took the opportunity to announce the findings from their latest UK Hosted Telephony and SIP trunk report on the day (See our article on SIP this issue for headlines) and overall this event comes as ‘highly recommended’ from the Comms Business perspective but if you missed it then why not attend our Channel Leaders event being held on 25 April in London in partnership with the Cavell Group. See
www.cbmagazine.co.uk for details.