As enterprises increasingly hire talent globally, building
high-performance global teams has become a critical success factor. Traditional
collaboration tools (email, file sharing, web conferencing, etc.) are
struggling to meet the rapidly evolving requirements for seamless virtual team
interaction.
A new generation of team collaboration tools has emerged
since early 2014. The leading function in these new tools is the persistent
conversation space (referred to as “channel” or “room”) followed by file
sharing and app / bot libraries (used for example for integrations with other tools).
Audio / video communication is sometimes embedded and sometimes provided via
integration with another service provider.
The emerging Team Collaboration market segment is a result
of the collision of two trends:
1) The rise of persistent collaboration spaces to support Agile
and DevOps
The software development community uses a lot of tools (mostly
in the Cloud) that make Agile software development easier: tools for tracking
bugs and features (like Jira), tools for code management (like GitHub and
Bitbucket), etc. Global development and operations (DevOps) teams require a
persistent collaboration environment, well integrated with development tools.
Slack, HipChat, and other tools are trying to meet the requirement. Since voice
and video can be quite disruptive, the focus is on persistent messaging (some
say “persistent chat”). Deep integration with software development tools is
essential.
While the concept emerged in software development, it is
transferable to other types of teams and we are already seeing options for
Marketing, Creative, Project Management, etc. as well as integrations with
business applications required for such teams to successfully collaborate.
2) The rise of messaging in the UCC space
Enterprise Unified Communication shifted its focus from
voice to video (video conferencing) and then to content sharing (web
conferencing) in pursuit of better collaboration / higher employee
productivity. The latest shift is happening right now and is about elevating
messaging to a primary collaboration mode. The trend probably started first
when Microsoft based Lync predecessor LCS on instant messaging and presence (rather
than on email, voice, or video) but the reason for that radical shift today is
the new messaging wave that is coming from the consumer space, where free messaging
mobile applications led to service providers cutting the cost for SMS, and to
everybody messaging everybody all the time. Employees are increasingly bringing
their consumer messaging habits into the enterprise and are increasingly using
messaging apps like Wechat, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger for business purposes…
The enterprises’ need for more control over security and
account administration led to UC vendors developing messaging-focused team
collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Unify Circuit, and Alcatel-Lucent
Rainbow. While messaging is the key functionality is the persistent
collaboration spaces, UC vendors leveraged their know-how in voice and video and
integrated these functions into the team collaboration tools. They also built
bridges to existing (“legacy”) applications to guarantee customer investment protection
and are working on customer migration stories.
Integrations with software development tools and business applications are still a challenge for the UC industry and there is considerable investment to partner / build integrations and close the gap.
Conclusion
Enterprises are looking for ways to leverage team collaboration
tools without adding complexity to their already complex collaboration
environments. The market is very new and quite fragmented, with each vendor
covering certain use cases a little bit better than the rest. In general, UC
vendors are providing better integrations with their UC stacks while newcomers focus
on developing rich integration capabilities with development tools and business
applications.
