The CF List: 2022's 20 UCaaS Providers You Should Know
Our latest list reflects M&A and other UCaaS industry trends.
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S&P Global’s Raul Castanon, Omdia’s Tim Banting and Jon Arnold cited Cisco as a top competitor. Last month, Cisco announced new Webex innovations to help organizations personalize the hybrid work experience for employees and customers, including a partnership with Ford to create the mobile office.
“Cisco has a strong heritage in optimizing its UCaaS service with an extensive hardware portfolio of endpoints,” Banting said.
Castanon, Banting and Arnold said 8×8 is a UCaaS heavyweight. In January, 8×8 completed its acquisition of rival Fuze for approximately $250 million. 8×8 said the deal will accelerate its XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service) innovation, and expand its enterprise customer base and global presence.
“Its recent acquisition of Fuze should help it boost its global footprint, especially in continental Europe,” Castanon said.
Dialpad remains a solid contender with strong investments in R&D and strategic acquisitions to continue innovating in its platform, encompassing UCaaS, video conferencing and meeting-room technology, CCaaS and Dialpad Sell, Castanon said.
“Dialpad is another good example of a player that’s done well in this space, and they’ve made a real strong push with AI,” Arnold said. “Their conversational AI capabilities are really good now, and they have a partnership with T-Mobile. That’s another type of partnership we’re starting to see directly with the carriers.”
Castanon and Banting cited GoTo as a top UCaaS contender. In February, LogMeIn rebranded to GoTo. It also launched what it says is a simplified product portfolio with a single application and two flagship products.
“Its recently announced flagship products – GoTo Resolve and GoTo Connect – build on its trajectory and reaffirm its focus on enabling secure, flexible work communications,” Castanon said.
Castanon and Banting said Google is among noteworthy providers.
“Google Cloud recently announced upcoming updates that places it ahead of its competition, including real-time collaboration features that enable users to hold meetings directly within the word processing, spreadsheet and slideshow applications in Workspace,” Castanon said.
Castanon, Banting and Arnold said Microsoft is a top UCaaS contender.
“Key data points from 451 Research’s ‘Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration Technology Ecosystems 2021’ survey show a substantial number of organizations use or plan to deploy Microsoft Teams as a UCaaS-enabling service using Microsoft Teams Operator Connect (41%) or Microsoft Teams Direct Routing (41%),” Castanon said. “The recently announced Operator Connect Mobile should give Teams additional momentum.”
RingCentral is noteworthy because of its many strategic partnerships in recent years, Arnold said.
“RingCentral has skillfully assembled a series of strategic partnerships, looking to expand its global footprint,” Castanon said. “These partnerships, which include big names such as Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE), Avaya, Mitel and European IT services firm Atos, are a strong testament to the company’s product vision.”
Castanon, Banting and Arnold said Zoom, whose customer base exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a noteworthy provider.
“Zoom is gaining ground as a video-first UCaaS vendor, with key innovations for secure collaboration and steadily expanding its Zoom Phone coverage,” Castanon said.
“Zoom has got good market penetration based on their conferencing heritage, and many customers are now taking their Phone service as well,” Banting said.
Arnold said Ericsson is noteworthy because of its $6.2 billion acquisition of Vonage announced last November.
“Ericsson making a run for Vonage, that seems like a strange pairing, right?” he said. “But it speaks to the growing interest among the wireless players to have an enterprise play, because with 5G coming, they’re in a better position to become the provider for everything. So if more and more enterprises start to turn to 5G as their core transport network, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t be offering these same customers UCaaS and CCaaS. And that’s certainly the, the road Ericsson is trying to go down with Vonage.”
Arnold said Sangoma is worth watching in the UCaaS market. Last month, Sangoma announced its acquisition of NetFortris for $80 million. The deal extends Sangoma’s suite of cloud services with new MSP capabilities, which it says means more one-stop shopping for customers. It’s the company’s eleventh acquisition in eleven years.
Mitel is a provider to watch. However, its strategic agreement with RingCentral could create challenges, Arnold said.
“That’s an interesting one with Mitel,” he said. “It’s more than just a partnership; that was intellectual property and patents. And that is going to make it harder for Mitel, I think, to stay truly independent and chart their own course for innovation. I think that’s going to be in RingCentral’s hands now.”
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) is notable mostly for its business in Europe and Asia, Arnold said. ALE has upgraded its Rainbow Hybrid solution with a new conferencing and peer-to-peer (P2P) user interface (UI). The update, which applies to both ALE’s hybrid and private cloud offers, delivers an improved user experience (UX), as well as more flexibility and optimization due to its streamlined layout.
Slack is a noteworthy contender in this market, Arnold said. Salesforce completed its $27.7 billion acquisition of the workplace communication tool last summer.
The Salesforce acquisition raises questions about Slack’s future in unified communications, he said.
“They’re still a viable enterprise platform that is widely used,” Arnold said. “It’s just not clear to me if that’s going to be their long-term home.
Nextiva is a prominent UCaaS player. Last fall, it announced it raised $200 million in funding from Goldman Sachs Asset Management in its first external funding round, at a $2.7 billion valuation. It is using the money to accelerate its innovation, go-to-market (GTM) expansion and growth in global markets. The company’s first outside funding capped a year of growth with $250 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). It also logged continued product development.
Avaya is a prominent UCaaS contender. For the first quarter of its fiscal 2022, Avaya reported $620 million in ARR for its OneCloud, which includes UCaaS. That’s up 17% sequentially and 137% from a year ago. OneCloud includes a portfolio of advanced cloud-based enterprise communication products.
BCM One is noteworthy because of its acquisitions, Arnold said. Last November, BCM One acquired CoreDial. The deal combined CoreDial’s strategy, team and technology with BCM One’s SkySwitch platform. It took the two largest white-label UCaaS providers and formed the “No. 1 private-label solution,” BCM One said.
Castanon and Arnold said Ooma is a leading contender. Castanon said Ooma has a strong focus and commitment to its channel partners, and continues to introduce innovative products, such as its next-generation cloud-based POTS replacement for telecom service providers.
Castanon and Arnold said Mavenir is one to watch in UCaaS.
“Mavenir, which recently unveiled MAVbiz, its SaaS-based business communications portfolio comprising customer engagement, business messaging, CPaaS, UCaaS and CCaaS, is looking to enable service providers, SIs and channel partners to identify and develop new revenue opportunities,” Castanon said.
Castanon said Kandy is a UCaaS vendor to watch.
“Kandy, with its white-label cloud technology for UCaaS, Microsoft Teams DRaaS (direct routing as a service), SIP trunking as a service, and CPaaS, has developed innovative business communications and customer engagement offerings in partnership with AT&T, Etisalat and Braidio,” he said.
Castanon cited Alianza as a noteworthy UCaaS vendor. It has a “strong focus and commitment to their channel partners, and continues to introduce innovative products – such as their next-gen cloud-based POTS replacement for telecom service providers,” he said.
Castanon cited Alianza as a noteworthy UCaaS vendor. It has a “strong focus and commitment to their channel partners, and continues to introduce innovative products – such as their next-gen cloud-based POTS replacement for telecom service providers,” he said.
All businesses need to evolve to survive and thrive, and UCaaS providers need to understand where they can add value to an organization.
UCaaS providers face a highly competitive market, which has been shaken up in the past year by M&A and strategic partnerships. The market is also crowded with little room for new entrants.
This is our second annual “CF List” focused on UCaaS providers, and the fifth if you count our previous CP lists. Analysts share their views on what it takes to succeed with the technology. It includes an updated list and fresh views on changes in the competitive landscape.
According to Future Markets Insights, the global UCaaS market should reach $85.7 billion by 2031. That’s a massive jump from $19.6 billion in 2020.
Hybrid Work, Cloud Influencing UCaaS Road Map
Raul Castanon is senior research analyst with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
451 Research’s Raul Castanon
“The emergence of the hybrid work model is accelerating the shift to the cloud as well as influencing the road map for UCaaS,” he said. “This is reflected in a growing demand for secure remote collaboration, with capabilities such as encrypted communications becoming increasingly relevant. Asynchronous collaboration is another capability that gained ground with the pandemic and is becoming increasingly relevant with hybrid work. Finally, another key trend is the integration of productivity tools with collaboration and communications, where Google Cloud and Microsoft have the upper hand with their respective productivity suites.”
Tim Banting is Omdia’s Digital Workplace Practice lead. (Omdia is part of Informa, the parent company of Channel Futures.)
Omdia’s Tim Banting
“We [were] going through the great resignation, [and] we are now in the great experimentation stage of, hopefully, post-pandemic working,” he said. “This is where organizations will be experimenting with what hybrid working means for their customers, business operations and employees. We already hear about employees ‘forced’ into their offices to sit on Teams and Zoom calls for hours when they could have been doing that from home. Omdia believes that hybrid working will now be a permanent requirement of most organizations, and the employee experience is now a priority. Omdia data shows that just under half of the workforce will work away from the office for at least three days per week.”
UCaaS Providers Layering On New Things
Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates. He said providers all have a strong video component to their UCaaS. Moreover, they keep layering on new things driven by video, not telephony.
J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold
“They’re getting into events now, for example,” he said. “You use these platforms now to reach not tens or hundreds of people, but thousands of people. So you’re doing all-hands meetings for a global organization. You’ve got to broadcast your earnings internally or new strategy for everybody. That’s what these platforms are being adopted for now.”
Core use cases are now “kind of saturated” so providers are trying to add new things, Arnold said.
“The biggest driver, I think, that’s going to take it to the next level is all the artificial intelligence (AI) stuff,” he said. “So you get the speech-to-text and text-to-speech, and the real-time translation and transcription. They’re all becoming must-haves now. And then it’s moving along to more intelligent applications where … the voice streams become data streams, which is what happens in these
environments now where all of the content can be tracked and searched, much like in the contact center. So now it becomes a new source of knowledge for the organization to mine.”
Based on feedback from analysts and recent news reports, we’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 UCaaS providers that are making the most of the competitive landscape and charting success. The list offers a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known companies that are making big strides in UCaaS. There also are some shake-ups on the list due to M&A and strategic partnerships since our last list.
Scroll through our slideshow above to see which UCaaS providers made the cut this year; then, compare it to last year’s list.
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