We are witnessing tremendous change in the cloud communications landscape. Here are a couple of key trends that look set to accelerate in the remainder of 2018 and beyond:

Collaboration platforms integrating advanced functionality

Advanced functionalities like voice activation, contextual communications or big data are being utilized more and more by businesses looking to take advantage of the full potential of the cloud. Some of the innovations that will become more mainstream in the coming months include:

• Voice activation and voice-driven IoT devices and applications. Voice based inputs in the enterprise context are set to increase significantly over the next few years with keyboard-based input declining in tandem.
• Contextual communications. For example, all inputs on a platform, conference calls and telepresence meetings will be recorded, documented and archived to facilitate cross-referencing and enable the right access by colleagues across geographies and teams.
• Big data. To facilitate contextual communications, big data will become more prevalently used within collaboration, combined with natural language processing to enhance analytic outputs.

These new trends show promise to revolutionize productivity within collaboration, minimizing low value-added tasks, ensuring that all relevant parties have the capabilities to access relevant data any time, and allowing flexibility, productivity and creativity. SIP Trunking is the basic enabler for these services, as fail-safe, reliable IP connectivity from device to cloud data center is essential as employees come to rely on these tools for their day-to-day activities.

Automation in number life-cycle management, powered by APIs: We are now seeing cloud service providers integrating automation into their offering. In order to do this, they’re upgrading their systems to integrate with suppliers and vendors, and APIs are playing a major role here. An API-based model can lead to faster time-to-market for new product and service integration, open up new market channels, and ensure that any one organizational process does not create bottlenecks. For example, number provisioning management is moving from the traditional portal based-model to an API-based model. Manual intervention is minimized and errors are greatly decreased. Unified communications, conference service and call center providers in particular are offering API-based provisioning to their customers, benefiting from faster number delivery and better control and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction.

Check back next quarter to see what other future trends we think will break through to the cloud communications world!