Alaa Saayed; Unified Comms Exponential Growth

Alaa Saayed is an ICT Industry Director at Frost & Sullivan; we talk the rapid pace of Unified Comms adoption across all regions and how integration, interoperability, and federation are crucial for that momentum to continue.

Alaa Saayed is an ICT Industry Director at Frost & Sullivan, working in Elka Popova's Connected Work team and covering team collaboration and enterprise communications in the North America region, but keeping an eye on Unified Comms from a global perspective.

Alaa says that demand for Unified Comms has been rife for the last 20-25 years across North America and EMEA in terms of IP PBX or some form of UC platform. In Latin America and APAC, penetration is getting higher and higher.
He uses the example of GrandStream IP phones in his local store in Buenos Aires to demonstrate how advanced other areas are  - despite being often overlooked as less mature markets.

We talk about lack of infrastructure in certain areas, even in EMEA, delaying the rollout of Unified Comms yet the Nordics, Germany, France, and the Benelux regions are much further advanced. Sometimes this isn't down to internet connectivity but mobile connectivity. Because of this, we still see TDM IP PBXs.

Career

Prior to Frost & Sullivan, Alaa was at Telefonica and Verizon based in Argentina.

At Telefonica, Alaa looked after residential and B2B comms at Verizon.

When moving to Frost & Sullivan in 2003, the TDM and IP market was just starting to grow. By 2020, Alaa says Unified Comms has changed exponentially in terms of IP and UCC adoption.

Today, we are talking about asynchronous communications as well as real-time calling.

Through the integration of email, presence, IM, and conferencing, the notion of UC is evolving more and more.

What is Unified Communications?

Alaa says when he joined the industry, the definition was limited to unified messaging. It then evolved to include email, IM, presence, voice, audio and video conferencing.

Today, the phrase Unified Comms is dated to Alaa. He prefers the term enterprise collaboration or integrated communication.

Just like the word conference is associated with the old world, we now talk about meetings instead of audio conferences. This is borrowed from the consumer world via apps like WhatsApp, which we are mimicking to progress Unified Comms in the business world.

Unified Comms Progress
Enterprise technology was typically replicated from the consumer world after 5-7 years. As technology has progressed, Alaa says the time period is getting smaller because of the SaaS influence on business communications.

Due to the influence of SaaS and the bandwidth available today, vendors have to continue to innovate to keep up. Vendors like Slack have contributed so much that everyone has to follow suit. I.e. Slack introduced team collaboration and Zoom changed the game with frictionless video. They have set the bar in cloud communications and also operate a freemium model.

I ask Alaa if freemium is key to Unified Comms in the future. He says definitely. It's another model borrowed from the consumer model and is something that is key for the democratisation of IP. We are seeing this of software and services but also with endpoints and hardware thanks to innovations like wireless.

Personal Preference

With so much influence from the consumer world, everybody wants to use what they feel they are most comfortable and productive with. There is also the accessibility demand. If there are devices of software we use in our consumer life and they work well, we want to use them in our work life too.

Alaa recognises there are both types of customer out there: those that let employees pick and choose from a list of best of breed tools but also those that dictate from a set technology stack.

Because of personal preference, we talk about how vendors must integrate with everybody else:
- Microsoft and Cisco allow you to join video conferences with each others devices
- Everybody has a Slack integration
- Phone system provides are introducing a "for Microsoft Teams" integration
- Every video conferencing service must seamlessly integrate with a team collaboration tool

Unified Comms is not unified unless it is interoperable or integrated.
New business is unlikely unless a vendor makes its product available to work with the tools that businesses already have.

Alaa calls out the next trends in UC as further adoption to larger numbers. Naturally, this will require external federation as the enterprise communicates with more outside contacts than ever.

Services like Mio and Nextplane have the potential to become the integrators for external communications between not only different tools but different businesses.

Without external federation, external communication will stagnate. Collaboration must be extended to the whole team otherwise the communication line will break down and we will resort to email and voicemail as we did in a previous life.

Resources
Alaa calls out his key resources as:

- UC Today
- No Jitter
- Tech Target
- Dave Michels, TalkingPointz
- Other analysts and analyst firms (competition is healthy)

You can find Alaa on Twitter and LinkedIn. He is also a regular contributor to NoJitter.

For more insight into the life of a Unified Comms influencer, make sure you follow the host Dominic Kent on Twitter, subscribe to the podcast on your favourite platform, and visit www.unifiedcommsinfluencers.com

Music: bensounds.com
Voiceover: https://www.fiverr.com/jay717

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