Taking a quick flight to Orlando, FL, theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, touched down at Enterprise Connect 2016 and hit the ground running. With no time to spare and without a production booth, John Furrier, host of theCUBE announced, “This is our foray into the Unified Communications (UC) marketplace.”

Expecting an explosion

According to Furrier, based on data from theCUBE, the Wikibon team and CrowdChat data, the community is saying that the area of UC is changing in real time. He explained that the space is about to explode by transforming from the old relic phone days where Voice over IP (VoIP) was the disruptive technology in voice to include video, group chat and a variety of software packages where the consumer experiences are driving the enterprise.

“So this confluence of enterprise software meeting the cloud, meeting the traditional unified communications space … this is going to explode,” he said.

The main story by John Furrier

“Here’s the main story. You have two schools of thought: You have old school and new school. The old school is the voice business, PBX, VoIP technologies that we’ve come to learn from the big telcos and getting better, cheaper phone service using Internet Protocol technology of IP Voice … VoIP is standard and baked into everything.

“We are seeing the consumer experience from Snapchat to Instagram and Facebook and CrowdChat, among other consumer technologies. It’s integrating into a rich user experience. Collaboration and engagement, center all this with Big Data and with the cloud; this space is going to be moving fast.”

“What will cloud do from a delivery standpoint and from a consumption standpoint? That is what’s going to be the impact for this industry of unified communications,” Furrier noted.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Enterprise Connect 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE