By Matt McGinnis
For those of us in the cloud communications space, last week’s news — that Zoom is buying Five9 for nearly $15 billion — was massively exciting.
Of course, as a founder, I’m thrilled to see innovators like Five9 valued so highly. But I think this move also says a lot about what users want and need from their communication tools. And it’s a big step toward how we all will communicate in the future.
It’s pretty clear that Zoom is working to bundle unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS), and online meetings into a trifecta. Online meetings are Zoom’s bread and butter. The UCaaS piece, Zoom Phone, adds voice to the equation. And Five9 will expand Zoom’s offering into CCaaS.
This combination will create an entirely new category in our space: unified communication and collaboration (UCC).
In this evolution towards UCC, the Zoom deal is just the tip of the iceberg. Other cloud communications leaders are also building out their platforms to deliver a full UCC suite. RingCentral launched video meetings to compete with Zoom. Zoom launched a cloud phone service to compete with RingCentral. Vonage bought New Voice Media and Tokbox. Microsoft scooped up Skype and integrated it into Office (and eventually deprecated it in favor of Teams).
The UCC evolution has been underway for some time. With remote work here to stay, the need for unified solutions is only accelerating.
But there are also limitations to this approach. Zoom is building a product suite that’s obviously targeted at businesses: one that promises easy billing on a per-seat basis for a combined voice and video solution. Where it falls short is in understanding the ways that communication has changed in recent years — and the extent to which people want something better.
I’ve written before about how old communications technologies just don’t cut it in the modern era. Consider email. It is asynchronous — making it less than ideal for real, rapid-fire conversations. It limits the size of the files we can share — not helpful for today’s rich media. And it’s spammy — forcing us to cut through the clutter to find the messages that matter.
Maybe worst of all, email is extremely insecure. Messages live on multiple servers, often unencrypted. Providers, meanwhile, are only too happy to sell our data to the highest bidder.
When email has so many issues, is it any wonder that people are turning to chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp, video tools like Meet and FaceTime, and file-sharing platforms like Dropbox? But here, too, things are less than ideal.
Bouncing between different voice, messaging, and video apps might have been the norm a few years ago. But today’s digital natives want better. And they’re forcing the communications industry to take “unified” to the next level to keep up.
Voice and video will continue to be important, particularly in the workplace. Outside of work, though? People, especially younger generations, increasingly want rich media experiences that offer new levels of context.
That’s why the communications realm is shifting to messaging-first. It’s a new way of communicating that considers how we actually engage with each other across varying sizes of groups, all types of files, and myriad devices.
The term “persistent messaging” partly captures the shift I’m talking about. When messages live in the cloud, they become truly device-agnostic. But imagine cloud messaging that also supports file sharing and rich media — and even lets you send email as needed.
This concept of messaging goes way beyond simple text messages/SMS to messages that combine textual plus vocal plus visual content in endlessly scrolling conversations. Messages that flow seamlessly, whether they take place between two people or hundreds of people. Messages that follow users from device to device, anywhere in the world.
When messaging is this rich and contextual, voice and video become a fallback. Both technologies still have their place. But video is quickly becoming the second fiddle to rich messaging, while voice has been relegated to the last resort.
Leading the way to a messaging-first world are Gen Y, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha (today’s 8-to-14-year-olds). These generations engage primarily using text-based messaging and video apps in their day-to-day interactions. They expect communicating to be fun and collaborative — and for it to be content-rich.
Content support is one of the most important things about the messaging (r)evolution. Memes, emojis, stickers, gifs, videos, pics, and other files like documents: The ideal solution will offer all these content types, along with the persistent functionality mentioned above.
What really matters — in terms of making a great, compelling, “sticky” product — is creating fun. Consider how Slack became the fastest-growing B2B app. It took a product that was traditionally very dull and added joy, with emojis, reactions, customizability, etc.
The younger generations get it: Sending messages should be fun. Only then will digital communication offer an experience on par with face-to-face, human-to-human conversation.
Cloud communications must have authentic engagement at its center. But, in thinking about how communications should look, putting people first is just the start.
Think about what people need from their messaging tools. In addition to rich content support, persistence, and a voice-and-video fallback, people deserve to have total control over who they connect with and how they communicate. It’s a new paradigm that requires an advanced application layer, because there’s a lot that has to happen in the back end for rich media and voice and video to be supported.
We have a name for this new paradigm: hyper-communications.
Hyper-communications facilitate formal and informal communications, with more content support than anything we use today. “Hyper-communications” mean rich interactivity. Hyper-communications consolidate textual, vocal, and visual conversation into one platform.
At illumy, we’re steering the messaging ship toward hyper-communications. The goal is to bring the best parts of instant messaging, texting, calling, voice, and video together to create a richer, more contextual, more fun experience.
As the communications industry keeps evolving, the challenge will be to go beyond individual modalities to focus on how the whole experience is delivered. We think there’s a huge opportunity here. The “unified” solutions promised by Zoom and others are just the first step.
The human side of communication shows us a clear path forward. With new levels of richness, interactivity, and, yes, joy in our communications, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be in the cloud comms space. I can wait to see what comes next!
