Frost Radar : Unified Communications as a Service in Europe, 2024

The European unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market is maturing quickly. This, combined with intensifying competition, is driving market participants to accelerate innovation and develop sustainable growth strategies. This Frost Radar™ analysis provides a perspective on key trends and assesses 19 growth and innovation leaders. The Frost Radar™ plots the selected UCaaS providers based on five growth and five innovation criteria that comprise both qualitative and quantitative factors. The quantitative metric used to evaluate providers’ performance in this market is hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony/cloud private branch exchange (PBX) or UCaaS seats.

The size of a provider’s UCaaS installed base in Europe is used to determine the top market participants to include in this evaluation. However, certain providers with comparatively large installed bases were excluded because of limited available information about their growth and innovation strategies or their inability to participate.

Technology developers leveraging their own proprietary platforms to deliver services and resellers providing their own branded UCaaS offers based on third-party platforms are included in this analysis. Services based on pure-cloud, multitenant, and multi-instance platforms are considered when evaluating providers’ market position and innovation and growth capabilities. For the purposes of this study, Frost & Sullivan considers all multi-instance and multitenant hosted IP telephony offerings to be cloud PBX solutions. The supporting communications hardware and software infrastructure can be hosted in a service provider or third-party data center or in a public cloud environment (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud).

This Frost Radar™ excludes customer premises-based multi-instance solutions, hosted single-tenant solutions, or cloud VoIP services that primarily target consumers and residential users (e.g., Google Voice, WhatsApp, Skype).

In bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) deployment scenarios, UCaaS seats are credited to the UCaaS application provider and not the PSTN connectivity provider. In scenarios in which the BYOC provider enables a full-featured cloud PBX seat to provide PSTN connectivity for a third-party UCaaS user, both the UCaaS and PSTN connectivity provider are credited for the seat.

In resale partnership arrangements (e.g., RingCentral partnerships with BT and Vodafone, and Cisco partnerships with Webex Calling resellers), both parties receive credit for the installed UCaaS seats. This approach allows Frost & Sullivan to assess and represent each provider’s growth capabilities more accurately.

The gap—in terms of growth rates and market share—between the leaders and trailers among 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 (voice, video, messaging), mobility, contact center, analytics, and integrations with third-party solutions via APIs. The objective is to infuse AI capabilities into all present and future functionalities to continually enhance customer end-user and IT administrator value, operational efficiencies, and effectively differentiate from competitors.

More specifically, technology developers are leveraging AI to strengthen voice calls with audio enhancements, live captions, automated recording, transcription, summary/recap, search, translation, advanced analytics, and other features. AI capabilities in messaging and meetings are similarly evolving.

Contact center and customer experience (CX) management solutions also present opportunities for cloud communications providers to expand their services suites and provide more value to businesses. Robust contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) capabilities are rapidly becoming 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 UC and CX 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 remain common strategies that providers will employ to boost innovation and accelerate growth. International expansion, both within Europe and other regions, provides additional growth opportunities for European-based UCaaS providers.

Looming ISDN and Cisco HCS platform decommissioning, and Vodafone's divestitures in Italy and Spain promise to catalyze customer migrations and competitive dynamics that we help shape the European UCaaS market in the near term.

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.