The rapidly growing cloud market and the significant shifts in the voice and data services marketplace have created unprecedented challenges and opportunities for service providers. While the challenges presented to service providers are numerous and of strategic significance, in the interest of brevity, I will focus on opportunities specific to cloud collaboration.
Business OTT services like UC, UCC, and social collaboration are experiencing a surge in demand (Gartner predicts the collaboration market with grow to $21 B by 2018), and offer much greater margins than consumer OTT services, which are harder to monetize. As PWC observed in its recent report, service providers are especially well positioned to serve the business market given their preexisting relationship in business IT departments, and ownership of networks and infrastructure which allows them to offer best-in-market SLAs.