Will Microsoft and Amazon continue to shape enterprise communication?...A year later and a brief update.
September 22, 2017 Microsoft's Skype For Business and Amazon Chime have a long way to go but they will continue to accelerate their influence on enterprise communication. Each company continues to deploy massive bandwidth, submarine and terrestrial, adding to already impressive infrastructures to support global voice, messaging and video.
There is rapid growth in Unified Communication with a significant number of market participants continuing to gain traction - 8x8, GoToMeeting, RingCentral, Shoretel, Vonage, WebEx to name a handful. Those market positions will be temporary with Amazon and Microsoft displacing them and perhaps acquiring some of these assets along the way.
The next disruption will focus on the traditional U.S. carriers. AT&T and Verizon will migrate to mobile-only service providers with proprietary content delivery and endpoint management as core offerings. A Sprint and T-Mobile combination seems likely to bring competitive scale, with Charter Communications in the mix for content delivery, forming a foundation for enterprise market traction for the combined entities.
Is this a "what if" or a "when" scenario...?
November 20, 2018 - THE UPDATE: Let's go with "when"! Amazon is including Microsoft's Skype within Amazon Alexa. I assume Amazon recognizes that Microsoft has a huge advantage in the communication market. Microsoft Office 365 is essentially everywhere and this includes Skype, Skype Business. In nearly every corporate environment, globally, huge communication infrastructure and expense can be eliminated by enabling and requiring all internal communication, static and mobile, over Skype. Given the ubiquity of Office 365, this can be extended to customers, suppliers, trading partners and other business points of contact via desktop, tablet and smartphone. Similarly, Alexa can rapidly address a significant portion of consumer market.
It will be a journey. However, a path toward Microsoft 'owning', at least, US-based corporate communication and consumer mobile communication with AT&T and Verizon is being paved. AT&T now has advantage under this scenario. With WarnerMedia, AT&T will now pair original content with mobile service subscriptions continuing their formidable position in mobility. Of course, Amazon's growing library of original content and Microsoft's massive position on devices could easily extend that partnership to a much broader consumer focus. The Sprint-TMobile combination will be one to watch for true-direction beyond 5G.