Frost Radar™: Unified Communications as a Service in North America, 2024

Frost Radar™: Unified Communications as a Service in North America, 2024

A Benchmarking System to Spark Companies to Action - Innovation That Fuels New Deal Flow and Growth Pipelines

Advanced market maturity is resulting in a slower installed base and revenue growth because of slower adoption among more conservative buyers and net new seats representing a smaller percentage of the base. However, strong recognition of UCaaS benefits—including improved operational agility, business continuity, and enhanced remote/hybrid workforce productivity—is driving growth for providers offering solutions that most effectively address key customer challenges.

The gap in growth rates and market share between the leading and trailing UCaaS providers is widening. This is compelling market participants to urgently seek greater differentiation and identify new growth opportunities. Providers offering collaboration-first and/or highly flexible, mobile-ready cloud communications services are likely to see higher cloud PBX/UCaaS growth rates.

Innovation leaders are leveraging converged communications platforms with artificial intelligence (AI) at the core to develop integrated services suites that support multiple communications and collaboration modalities, mobility, contact center, analytics, and integrations with third-party solutions through flexible application programming interfaces (API). The objective is to infuse AI capabilities into all present and future functionalities to continually enhance customer end-user and IT administrator value and effectively differentiate from competitors.

More specifically, technology developers are leveraging AI to enhance video meetings with live captions, automated recording, transcription, summary/recap, search, translation, user avatars, and other advanced features. Similarly, messaging capabilities are evolving in organization, searchability, archiving, and more. Providers are also enhancing voice calling services with automated call recording, transcriptions, summaries, and advanced analytics.

Contact center and customer experience (CX) management solutions also present opportunities for cloud communications providers to expand their service suites and provide more value to businesses. Going forward, strong contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) capabilities will be an important part of cloud communications suites and a competitive advantage for technology developers and service providers. Innovative providers are developing persona-based user experiences that combine unified communications and customer experience functionalities to address unique user needs based on job roles and specific communications requirements.

As the market matures and competition intensifies, growth and innovation become more challenging to achieve organically. Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and strategic partnerships will be common strategies that providers will employ to boost innovation and accelerate growth. International expansion provides additional growth opportunities for North America-based UCaaS providers.

Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to chart their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™ considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.