Bringing communication to the context – turning UC upside down
The disruption of the communication market happens right now. Whereas until now we had one communication tool for everything, soon we can communicate in every tool.
The evolution of telecommunication was always about making communication faster, richer, and more widely available. If you are interested in learning more about the history of communication, I have written a short piece a few weeks back.
We are now at a stage where we have super rich web conferencing solutions readily available on every computer and smart phone. The prevailing story throughout all these developments is that it was the communication tool that improved, morphed and re-invented itself. This development is comparable to the story of the horse that became a racing car and a truck.
One of the big topics in the Unified Communication (UC) market is the context of communication:
- You talk to customers and would like to have customer information displayed alongside the video stream.
- You talk to new leads and would like to show your sales presentation while speaking.
- You have a team meeting and want to pull up documents discussed previously.
In all these cases you want to enrich the communication with context.
If I was drawing a diagram I would use a star alongside the old saying that “all roads lead to Rome”, i.e. whatever the context is, we use the same communication tool. Rome fell and I believe that this strategy will fail too.
The disruption of the UC market began with WebRTC. WebRTC is not just another type of a car, to come back to the analogy above. Instead, WebRTC is like a garage, it allows you to build any type of car. And with this we can now change the evolution of UC clients, we can change its direction, we can and are changing the future of communication. From today on, we bring the communication tool to the context rather than bringing context to the communication tool. This is a big change of mindset and a market that is just being created now.
We first announced an integration into the email client Mailbird. This brings communication right into the context of any email conversation you have.
We are working on other integrations to be announced later on. The big picture here is that we can bring communication to where there were no communication capabilities before. We enable people to communicate in their own context. That's something that was unseen, a blue ocean that is just being discovered now.
