After a brief period of dormancy, the unified communications (UC) industry took a healthy jump to life last year. What will this year bring for the industry? UC experts are predicting the biggest trends and what they mean for enterprises and institutions looking to expand and improve their collaboration experience in 2015. A recent article on TechTarget explored the top unified communication and collaboration trends of the last 12 months, which they predict will stay strong in 2015. Let’s talk about some of them.

The Growing Popularity of UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS). 2014 witnessed an increased adoption of cloud-based UC. The article cited some relevant findings from Nemertes Research’s Enterprise Technology Benchmark, “One in 3 enterprises moved to a cloud-based email or calendar platform, with another 12% planning to migrate in 2015.” According to Nemertes analyst, Irwin Lazar, cost-effectiveness, higher scalability, and quick deployment are some of the biggest reasons behind the popularity of UCaaS.

More Companies Using Cloud-Based Video Conferencing. Costly room video conferencing systems are quickly being replaced by less costly, cloud-based systems available for desktop and mobile devices. Pointing to Google’s 2014 announcement of its partnership with Vidyo, the article predicts that the blending of cloud-based video with on-premises systems will continue in 2015.

Tools Making Collaboration Easy. Last year Cisco and Unify released collaboration tools that would act as better alternatives to email for group communication, setting this year’s industry movement toward combining messaging, file-sharing, audio, video and Web conferencing into a single easy-to-use format.

UC Becoming More Social. Social integration has been one of the major trends in 2014 with social-embedded UC products like Unify Circuit and Cisco Project Squared arriving in the scene. This year we’ll witness “more robust versions” while “rivals like IBM, Jive Software, and Microsoft are likely to improve their more mature products.”

WebRTC Makes UC a Web-app Feature. The trend of web-browser based audio and video conferencing made WebRTC support crucial for browser makers. In 2015, more business software developers and UCC vendors will incorporate WebRTC into products. Not only this, more B2C businesses will start using WebRTC technology to add audio and video communications to websites and mobile apps. Twilio, a service API provider for voice calls, VoIP, text messaging etc., has jumped on the WebRTC bandwagon, and its rivals, Plivo, Voxeo Corp., and Tropo, are very likely to join soon.

Mobile UC Rises in Demand. With cloud-based UCC becoming increasingly popular among enterprises, there has been a growing demand for easy-to-use mobile UC that can help employees and executives connect and collaborate even on the fly. Big players like ShoreTel and AT&T are planning to expand their video conferencing services to mobile to make the most of this trend. This year, we can expect to see many new products and services entering the mobile UC market.

Other trends worth noting are: enterprise demand of UC monitoring software growth; organizations needing to mitigate interoperability issues by breaking existing silos; and increasing security threats to VoIP.

After reviewing these prediction, do you think last year’s trends will be carried forward in 2015 or will we see some entirely new concepts emerging this year? Share your thoughts with us.