Featured Article from Unified Communications Headsets

Top 10 Unified Communications Stories of 2015

By John Casaretto
Contributing Writer

The unified communications landscape is ever-shifting and along the way, there are stories that encompass the changes in the industry. TechTarget put together the top ten stories that helped guide the world of unified communications throughout 2015. These trends and topics are among the most important to the businesses that use unified communications. Heading into 2016 and the developments that will take place in the year ahead, look for these stories to continue and continue to shape the conversations that surround unified communications.

1. Microsoft (News - Alert) versus Cisco -

These two heavyweights really had it out in 2015. Microsoft introduced telephony in its Office 365 application suite. This is a firm step in Cisco (News - Alert)'s market space and there is little doubt that this showdown will rage on.

2. Collaboration tools for Microsoft -

As if Office 365 wasn't growing enough, Microsoft brought new tools to the product by introducing OfficeGraph, Sway and Delve into the mix. Office 2016 also saw expansion in collaborative features.

3. Cisco and team collaboration -

Cisco finally did something big with Spark. It is now a team collaboration tool that integrates into its total collaboration package. This powerful lineup includes WebEx and other popular tools.

4. Video conferencing transformation -

Video conferencing moved into more cloud-based solutions and software solutions than ever before. A number of new hardware tools became available as well including Microsoft's Surface Hub and other innovative elements such as drones.

5. Consumer tools meet business tools -

Enterprise and consumer tools increasingly merged. Beyond Google's progressively growing world of Chrome and Apps, Facebook (News - Alert) and other giants jumped into the fray as well.

6. Real-time collaboration appears -

Finally a player in the game, real-time collaboration became more visible as employee workflows appeared in applications, browsers, and collaboration tools.

7. WebRTC emerged -

Everything seems to be going to browsers as web applications become more powerful, more critical, and more enabled than ever before. WebRTC was the difference maker in 2015, allowing federations, communications, and security for a nice enterprise approach.

8. UC troubles -

For all that unified communications provides, it provided headaches to some that were deploying it in 2015. A variety of issues from user training, single-vendor, experience concerns, and more plagued the industry.

9. Goodbye email -

It seems that every so often, we hear about some company that doesn't do email, either on principle or through technology. 2015 was a year where several products actually made getting rid of email actually viable, replacing it with collaboration and messaging.

10. UC networks go software defined -

Software-defined networking arrived in unified communications. with it, the management and prioritization of network resources became a commodity that could tune, build, and deploy the resources that support unified communications.

You can never be sure of what the future holds, but there is little doubt of which stories affected the year that we just went through.