BroadSoft: Cloud UC Adoption Accelerating Across All Segments

More than half of businesses are expected to adopt cloud UC by 2020, surpassing premises-based PBX as businesses of all sizes shift to the cloud for UC, team collaboration and contact-center services.

That’s according to BroadSoft’s second annual survey of global telecom providers and industry leaders. The results show that respondents expect the UCaaS/hosted PBX share of new lines shipped to reach 51 percent by 2020, a 10 percentage-point increase from last year’s survey results.

Mark Straton, BroadSoft’s vice president of content marketing and media relations, tells Channel Partners the survey points to a few clear opportunities for the channel.

“First, cloud demand is not confined to small businesses,” he said. “In fact, the most significant change in optimism for cloud adoption is occurring in the large enterprise segment, where survey respondents expect 45 percent of large enterprises to adopt UCaaS/hosted PBX by 2020 – a whopping 25 percentage-point increase from last year’s survey. Second, the contact center is a market ripe with opportunity: By 2020, survey participants forecast that 43 percent of contact center seat shipments will be cloud based.”

Eighty-four percent of respondents also consider predictive analytics as important to end users, suggesting businesses will increasingly seek analytics-based cloud contact center offerings, Straton said.{ad}

“In terms of challenges, clearly the enterprise messaging/team collaboration space is heating up with recent announcements by Slack and the introduction of Microsoft Teams,” he said. Straton believes that an integrated solution that wraps team collaboration in with UC and other business services can reduce complexity.

While mobility is a key priority for enterprises, the user experience of real-time UC on mobile delivered over the top (OTT) has not quite kept pace, according to BroadSoft.

“The channel has an opportunity here for sure, as long as it is able to deliver solutions that map to the way today’s workforce operates,” Straton said. “Mobility is a key example: In the survey, 89 percent of respondents believe that native mobile integration, as opposed to over the top (OTT) apps, is an important requirement for mobile solutions. The channel must deliver native mobile integration capabilities, as well as communication and collaboration services that meets the needs of today’s modern workforce.”

Team collaboration is emerging as a key opportunity for telecom providers, a notable trend as enterprise messaging apps gain traction in the enterprise, according to the survey. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said team collaboration is an important end-user requirement in their respective markets, while 95 percent believe integrating team collaboration into their UCaaS offers represents a significant business opportunity.