Recent industry events point to more UC vendors adopting a platform approach as market competition heats up.
The last several weeks have been busy for the unified communications (UC) market. Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom held customer events, releasing a slew of new features, while RingCentral held an analyst event in October to share its accomplishments and future plans. Across all these events and introductions, one theme emerged — the UC platform.
UC vendors (including the above and 8×8, Dialpad, GoTo, Mitel, Vonage, and others) are rapidly broadening their product lines to add new capabilities like virtual events, digital whiteboards, office space reservation, remote support, analytics, AI-powered voice and video enhancements, virtual reality, expanded meeting features, and more recently, ad-hoc and asynchronous collaboration.
In addition, vendors are opening the doors to developers through expanded APIs and developer education efforts designed to make it easy for customers to adapt UC apps to specific business needs and use cases. For example, during an industry applications session at Zoomtopia, Zoom product leaders touted the ability to adapt Zoom to support use cases in education, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. RingCentral noted that it currently has more than 75,000 developers who have built thousands of custom apps, and Cisco touted a two times increase in Webex API usage over the last year.
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