Charting collaboration: the meteoric rise of team chat

By Monica Visconti-Patel, Senior Director EMEA Sales and Marketing, at RingCentral.

Monday, 18th April 2016 Posted 8 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Collaboration tools grow more popular every day but they didn’t fall from the sky during the most recent tech boom. Apps like Slack and Glip can trace their origin to the rise of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) products that sought to improve workplace efficiency by extending the reach of telecom technology. What we’re seeing now isn’t the end of UCC but an expansion of it.

As the way we work has evolved because of the Internet so too has unified communications. Telephony, once at the core of how businesses communicated, has been augmented by lightweight chat software that cuts down on unnecessary email and enables teams to communicate as if they were all in the same room. This speaks to the alarming speeds companies work at to be competitive. In a world where being first to market can make or break a business, efficient communication can make a tremendous difference. Ultimately, what we’re seeing now is an innovative new iteration on a continually relevant concept: a centralized hub for workplace communications.

The crucial user interface pivot happened around 2010, according to Gartner. That’s when IM/contact list features came to UCC platforms that already included Voice Over IP (VoIP) and video chatting. 2015 solidified the “meeting room” format many of us already find familiar: a sidebar with relevant teams and contacts, searchable chat history, and many multimedia or third-party functions. Team chat doesn’t just want to be where you chat about projects, but the place where you edit files, schedule meetings, and distribute tasks.

The future of collaboration software is feature-rich. Startups are finally realising what companies want in addition to team chat: the video call, document-editing, and telephony capabilities they’re accustomed to. They’re not just looking for an internal tool, but an all-in-one hub for employee and customer communications alike. Players big and small are now working on software that empowers teams to choose the best communication methods for them. Sometimes it could be team chat and other times it could be a video meeting or a phone call.

The way we work will always evolve. As technology continues advancing at breakneck speeds, it’s easy to see team chat as a one-off solution to a vexing problem. But this ignores team chat’s roots in unified communications, at the center of the modern communication suite. The rise of collaboration software speaks not only volumes about the value of team chat, but also reveals what companies are really looking for: options.