From cloud migration to AI integration, five forces are reshaping global enterprise telecom strategies
It’s nothing new that with strong communications comes business success. However, the nature of strong communications in the post pandemic workplace has changed dramatically, with technologies and tools almost unrecognizable compared with their predecessors of a decade ago.
Telecommunications remains a business-critical capability, with people still needing phone numbers to reach — and be reached by — people external to their organizations for ad hoc conversations outside of pre-scheduled meetings.
The telecoms industry is by no means exempt from the changing demands of the modern workplace. Businesses can stay ahead of the curve or be left behind in such a dynamic industry environment and being aware of the trends that are reshaping the industry is critical to secure best-in-class and fit-for-purpose communications.
Below, we highlight five key trends impacting businesses in today’s remote and hybrid working environment.
1. The cloud telecoms revolution
The shift from on premises telephony to cloud-based telephony may have started well before the pandemic but has undoubtedly accelerated as enterprises seek to provide effective and flexible access to high quality service for their remote and hybrid teams.
Moving to the cloud helps both users and the enterprise itself. Users can make and receive phone calls wherever they have internet access, be that at work, at home or on the move, with their numbers no longer tied to a physical desk or office. Enterprises are also able to decommission all on-premises legacy equipment (PBXs) from their offices and sites worldwide, eliminating the associated overhead costs of support, upgrades and replacement.
Gartner forecasts that 77% of the telecoms market will have shifted to the cloud by 2027.
2. UC: the power of integration
A recent trend, but an incredibly fast-moving one nevertheless, is the integration of telephony into broader UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These platforms grew exponentially in the wake of the pandemic and have become the nerve centers of remote and hybrid collaboration. Teams became Microsoft’s fasting ever growing product, with their CEO, Satya Nadella, commenting early in the pandemic that they had “seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months.”
However, while out-of-the-box Teams is incredibly rich — messaging, channels, meetings, video calls and much more — telephony is the missing piece that needs specific and additional integration. As such, many businesses have understandably been doing this integration to achieve ‘truly unified’ communications.
3. From ‘landline and mobile’ to ‘business and personal’
From the onset of mainstream mobile telecoms in the 1980s, a natural distinction emerged between landline (or fixed line) service and mobile service. Your landline service rang on your desk phone, and your mobile service rang on your mobile device.
However, cloud-based telecoms are rapidly changing that mindset as cloud numbers ring on all devices that are connected to the internet. For example, Microsoft Operator Connect telephony enables calls to be made and received from your desk phone, PC, laptop and mobile.
This means that you only need one business number — your Microsoft Teams telephony number — and that number is fully functional on all relevant devices. You no longer have to give out your personal mobile number (or a separate second work number) for people to be able to reach you when you’re on the move. Instead, your mobile number can be preserved for personal use, which is a very welcome segregation for many.
Hence the change in mindset trend away from ‘landline and mobile’ and towards ‘business and personal’.
4. Nothing is escaping AI
AI is now pretty much everywhere, and telecoms is no exception.
Tools such as Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, are transforming productivity by delivering businesses real-time insights and enhancing operational efficiency. However, Copilot is only as good as its underlying data set, and an incomplete AI data set can be detrimental to its effectiveness.
Copilot naturally leverages all data in its Microsoft environment including Teams chats, conversations, and meetings, but telecoms calls are not captured by default. This data, often including important interactions with customers, is critical if Copilot is providing optimized insights.
And so, a trend is emerging to incorporate telecoms data into an enterprise’s AI data set. By no means the only solution, but a relatively simple solution here is to integrate telecoms with Teams via Operator Connect, which becomes a further driver of the UC-integration trend above.
By harnessing the full potential of telecom data, organizations can make more informed decisions, deliver more personalized experiences and better meet customer needs.
5. The rise of the multinational ‘meta telco’
Finally, a trend rapidly taking hold in the multinational enterprise market is the emergence of next-generation, multinational ‘meta telcos’.
Until recently, multinational organizations have worked with multiple country-specific or regional telephony vendors, each coming with their own contracts, pricing structures, management portals (if indeed any at all), SLAs and billing.
But why would these multinationals want to maintain such a disparate patchwork of telco vendors when they are managing their primary communications platform, Microsoft Teams, on a global basis? Surely, they would rather the management of their whole communications stack to be globally consistent. With telecoms now essentially just another data application over broadband, why have tens of telco vendors when you can just have one?
However, a global go-to-market strategy simply isn’t suited to the big telcos. They have evolved their primary business to broadband network operations and service provision, which remain physical in nature due to the so-called ‘last mile’ interconnections into every home and office. What was once copper wire for telecoms is now fiber for broadband, but it’s still just as physical and unconducive to global service provision.
And therefore, the trending need for a new breed of multinational cloud meta telcos to fulfill the geographic consolidation gap in the multinational enterprise market.
Staying ahead in an interconnected world
These five trends are transforming the telecommunications landscape to face the demands of the modern flexible and AI-centric working environment. Enterprises that embrace the trends will be well placed to compete and win in a world where strong communications comes business success.
