It is clear that Covid has changed the workplace forever and beneficiaries have been the UC and collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and WebEx. In most workplaces, the option didn’t exist to regularly work remotely and as a result, companies didn’t necessarily provide UC and collaboration tools required. Covid changed all that and remote working became mandatory for most of us. At first, we used the tools to simply have multi-person video calls, but quickly started sharing screens and in many cases moved to mass participation web conferences.
In the past, it was the PBX or hosted PBX providers that were providing UC add-ons to their basic service sometimes at a significant premium. Now it is the collaboration vendors that, with the addition of PSTN calling, are now displacing the PBX and/or hosted PBX. It is now relatively easy to port a UK PSTN number to an MS Teams user and use that single client (desktop and mobile) to be able to interact using the rich Teams experience or make and receive traditional voice calls as required.
At the moment the UC collaboration experience is all based on two dimensions video and screen sharing. However, we already see our SIMs being used in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications in specialist industries with purpose-built tools and devices. However companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google are investing heavily in AR and VR for both consumers and businesses. This combined with the widespread availability of 5G makes me think it won’t be too far away before the UC and Collaboration tools that we use every day start to open up AR and VR for widespread B2B use.
Jola
Jola is an award-winning, supplier of business communications, specialising in mobile data SIMs. Jola sells on a wholesale basis to MSPs, ISPs, IT Support companies and Telecommunications Resellers. These channel partners supply solutions to public sector organisations and enterprises worldwide. Mobile Manager was the first of its kind and still the most used portal in the channel. To find out more, request our Partner Pack.
