What'e next int the Cloud Foray - UCaaS

In past posts I have talked about how there would be changes coming to  in the cloud space.  I wrote several post on Infrastructure as a Services.  One of the big things that we are able to see is that the Infrastructure as a Service has rapidly become a commodity service where prices are dropping on what the services is.  The next wave of cloud would be an expansion of the SaaS model.  It is very hard to differentiate hardware in the market.  It is all about who is fastest cheapest and has the best support offering for the money.   There is also a proliferation of vendors that are able to provide that service.  At some point the market will start to consolidate some of the services and this business model becomes unprofitable.  SaaS offering provide a means for differentiating the services.

One of the recent directions in the last year or so is the move to push voice traffic out to the cloud.  This type of computing is called Unified Communications as a Service.  I know a lot of users would say OK isn't that where it came from originally.  AT&T and Verizon and others have been providing this services for years.  What has changed.

Several years ago businesses were paying a lot of money to have someone manage their telecommunications equipment of provide dial tone.  Users were charged by the minute for what the got.  In the early 90's with the advent of the Internet and the increasing bandwidth available enterprises started to look at hosting their own PBX and Voice equipment and managing it on their own with VOIP.  This help save some money but the complexity shifted from the carriers to the enterprises where they had to have the expertise in-house and had to deal with refresh cycles.

So why is this important?  UCaaS is a way to reduce some of that complexity by having other organizations focus on it.  Is it bound to take the market by storm?  Maybe.  Some people see this as stuck in a rut and not growing with the potential that it could.  One of my colleagues from Australia wrote a post about the early adopters of the technology and where this movement may be going.   http://gavinhill.dimensiondata.com/

If we look at many economic curves this seems to be consistent with product life cycles in general.   For successful products there is typically a bell curve of early adopters that move into a growing market segment and then potentially to decline as new technologies become stale or other ones emerge.  I see the chasm that we are seeing right now as the market deciding what they want to do.  As more vendors jump in and convince users to move to the next technology that their will be a good growth rate followed by new innovations.   Time will tell what model will prevail but we will be hearing a lot more about UCaaS in the coming years.