How will the shift towards mobile UC affect the carrier service providers? Will end users benefit?

How will the shift towards mobile UC affect the carrier service providers? Will end users benefit?

How will the shift towards mobile UC affect the carrier service providers? Will end users benefit?

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The effects on carriers will depend on the type of operator. The obvious beneficiaries are those with fixed and mobile networks and with presence in large enterprises -- such as Verizon's and AT&T's business services groups, or France Telecom or Deutsche Telekom. They will be able to offer hosted unified communications (UC) services using their combined networks, as well as increasing the fees they can charge for messaging and communications valued added services, even when enterprises are running their own platforms.

A more significant and strategic enterprise presence for converged telcos will be welcome to their business models, especially as they start to set up huge data centers in the cloud and shift to managed services. Where enterprises opt for a managed service, there should be cost and efficiency savings, though many of the carriers' offerings are unproven, and may not necessarily appear more attractive to the end users than what they had before -- much will depend on how much third parties invest in frontline support for customers and in a range of devices and applications to spur uptake of UC. In this, they will be competing with moves from enterprise focused providers, from telecoms vendors like Ericsson offering hosted UC, and of course from Google.

This was first published in April 2009