Tech Trends 2015: Cloud-Based Communications and the Consumerization of IT

Mobile computing, social media, and “the cloud” were once foreign concepts to most people. But today these technologies are fundamental to how we live, work, and play. So what’s next? What new technologies will take the business world by storm in the coming year?

People have talked about the consumerization of IT for a while, but it’s finally going to happen in 2015. As consumers, we live the future, with applications that make best use of cloud technology for communications. Going forward, these technologies and applications will finally reach large swaths of the enterprise. Here are a few trends to watch in the coming year.

Cloud-based solutions for enterprise communications. This area of technology will see enormous growth in 2015. Many forward-thinking companies are moving to a model that puts video not only in every conference room, but also in the hands of every knowledge worker. Public cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services and the IBM (News - Alert) Cloud have finally grown to support the bandwidth, stability, and availability that the enterprise expects. That means employees can reliably and securely meet over video from wherever they are—whether on their laptops, tablets, or smartphones.

What’s more, these lower-priced, highly scalable cloud-based video solutions will reach beyond the boardroom and deliver a connected experience to every employee in every room across every organization.

The maturation of this Infrastructure-as-a-Service technology is also now leading to an acceleration of Software-as-a-Service applications for the enterprise. It’s not just about consumer services like Snapchat or Vine or Facebook (News - Alert) or Twitter anymore. Instead, vendors are bringing interesting cloud offerings for the enterprise that are redefining things like team collaboration and document sharing. In 2015, we’ll start to see an even greater variety of cloud offerings, such as the rise of real-time communication applications.

Consumer-driven demand for enterprise technology. The demand for video communication has never been higher. But what’s really interesting is that this demand is now being driven by consumers, not by the IT department. Today, anyone in the world with a smartphone can make a video call. When people walk through the doors of their office, they’re going to expect to communicate with their co-workers in the same way.

That’s particularly true with Millennials. Twenty years ago, when I started in video, nobody wanted to use video conferencing. They were scared of cameras. Not anymore. This generation is extremely comfortable with video. They understand that video offers a demonstrably more effective level of engagement. Today’s employees want to bring their consumer experiences into the office, and video is one of their top demands.

Moving forward, we’ll see more examples of employees pushing technology on the IT department, not the other way around.

Fortunately, as the technology has grown in terms of user adoption, it has also become easier to use and more cost effective for the enterprise. In the past, it was impossible to video-enable every conference room and every employee. The infrastructure would have cost organizations millions of dollars, so it just wasn’t feasible. That’s not the case any longer. Functionality that used to be driven by expensive, in-house hardware and servers now exists in the cloud at a fraction of the cost.

It’s important to remember, however, that IT professionals will still want business-class features, support and security. That’s where the technology will go next. Video in the enterprise must have a consumer-like, on demand, call anyone, anytime, anywhere capability, but it also must have business-class features and security.

Low-cost computing driving down communications costs. Over the past few months a variety of companies have told me the same thing: “We want to use video. We want to enable our entire workforce with video. We want to put this in every conference room.  But it needs to cost no more than $2,000 for a conference room. And I don’t want to own or manage any infrastructure.”

That’s possible now. End point costs are changing dramatically. For example, Chrome technology is really bringing value to the table. You can buy a Chromebook PC and hook in a high quality pan-tilt-zoom camera, and the price point for video is now $2,000 per conference room, not $10,000.

In general, this coming year will see a growing adoption of Chromebooks and other low-cost computing devices in the enterprise. Employees can do almost everything on them. Look for more work shifting to Chromebook-type browser-based applications on these thin, light, almost disposable notebooks.

While the future is here for many of us day-to-day, it hasn’t fully reached the enterprise. We’ll all look back on 2015 as the year that video communications really began to accelerate in the business environment.

For more on all the latest technology and trends happenings, be sure to register to attend ITEXPO, the business technology event that brings together service providers, enterprises, government agencies, resellers, vendors and developers to demo, discuss and network all the latest innovations changing the marketplace. ITEXPO (News - Alert) is being held January 27-30, 2015, at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida.   Stay in touch with everything happening at the event -- follow us on Twitter.