Mobile World Congress is coming up soon and it’s always fun to speculate on industry marketing trends one might expect to see. First of all, with a generally poor 2016 for telecom infrastructure vendors, which comprise the bulk of the companies with MWC booths, we’ll probably see an overall muting of far out expensive “come look here” marketing and parties. I do expect to see three main trends, though:
- IoT messaging will be everywhere. I might even see drones flying around with little marketing banners, though I doubt the GSMA would allow that. But I would expect to see companies finally capitalizing on the merger of IoT with Real-Time Communications with messaging on that topic. I know at least one company that will be doing that :).
- And we’ll see video make a bit of a marketing comeback, because of what I said above. A key real-time communication function is video, and if we go back to that flying drone, a small camera on that drone (or many IoT devices) just makes sense.
- NFV will also be a topic but we’ll start to see muddled messaging because many companies will confuse NFV and Cloud. NFV is different from Cloud – NFV is something very specific with specs and VNFs and Heat Maps and such – very telco, if you will. But running a function in a Cloud like AWS is not the same thing. And this could quite be what the industry really wants and where the real money is. While Dialogic is very specific about our NFV and Cloud infrastructure products messaging, everyone is not. And therefore, I’m quite sure we’ll see messaging that equates NFV to Cloud, and Cloud to NFV, and just generally tries to NFV-ize and Cloud-ize everything.
Let’s see what happens. I’ll report back while at the show.
