The CF List: 20 Top UCaaS Providers You Should Know
Zoom's meteoric rise prompted other venders to improve their offerings.
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Zoom’s meteoric rise during the pandemic makes it a compelling force in UCaaS. It’s cited by Castanon, Arnold and Bruce Aldea, partner engineer at AppSmart.
“Zoom, as we know, was adopted as the go-to collaboration tool when the pandemic started,” Aldea said. “They have added cool features like breakout meeting rooms inside of a meeting that will push the others to adopt. Zoom’s collaboration tool development has been good for the industry and clients, as the other providers, are improving their own technology. The newness in their phone offering is always a concern. Voice isn’t an easy business, but it is being adopted and time will tell when the growth curve tops out. As for now, they continue to add features and build momentum inside the base of clients that were using their collaboration tool.”
On the security front, Zoom’s acquisition of Keybase has it one step ahead of the competition, Castanon said.
Arnold cites 8×8 as one of the three main cloud disruptors. Gartner lists 8×8 among leaders on its latest Magic Quadrant for UCaaS. It was also named a leader in the 2021 IDC Marketscape for Worldwide UCaaS service providers for enterprise.
Arnold and Castanon cite RingCentral as a major contender Arnold said it’s one of the three main cloud disruptors.
RingCentral’s acquisition of Kindite, a provider of cloud end-to-end encryption (E2EE), gives it a competitive advantage in security, Castanon said.
AireSpring is touted as a challenger by Justin Foxwood, AppSmart’s solution specialist, telco and global markets. It’s well positioned to handle the networking and security challenges associated with remote work.
“With the continued decentralization of business networks due to the now massive remote workforce, UCaaS providers are not just tasked with providing a robust, feature-rich UCaaS solution,” he said. “They must also help address networking and security concerns (SD-WAN/SASE).”
Cisco is cited by Castanon as a leading UCaaS contender.
“When it comes to the user experience, interactive collaboration is emerging as a key differentiation, with vendors looking to provide capabilities for interactive collaboration such as integration to digital whiteboards and surveys, polls and questions, to name a few of the new innovations in the space,” he said. “Cisco, with its acquisitions of BabbleLabs, Slido and Voicea, is among those leading the pack when it comes to remote, interactive collaboration.”
Aldea and Foxwood cite Microsoft as a key player.
“A successful UCaaS provider in the current competitive landscape needs to be equipped with key business application integrations in order to provide customers the seamless experience they desire,” Foxwood said. “Microsoft Teams being the most common example of this, most users do not want to have to switch between business applications to communicate internally/externally. The UCaaS provider needs to be able to meet the user where they want to live from an application perspective.”
Salesforce has an interesting UCaaS story ahead of it. Arnold says he’s interested in seeing how Salesforce will use Slack. In December, Salesforce confirmed it is acquiring Slack in an eye-popping $27.7 billion deal. Expect it to close later this year.
Sangoma’s acquisition of Star2Star makes the combined company a hot pick among UCaaS providers. The $437 million merger creates a key rival for 8×8, RingCentral and Vonage.
“That’s been a good story,” Arnold said. “In their view, Star2Star feels they have a very distinct value proposition that no one has because Sangoma has a lot of the hardware pieces that make for a stronger solution.”
Castanon cites T-Mobile for Business for its recently announced partnership with Dialpad that launched WFX Solutions. Among the solutions is T-Mobile Collaborate, a suite of cloud-based tools for business calling, messaging and conferencing from any device, anywhere.
Also, Arnold said Dialpad has “kind of been a bit of an under-the-radar company, but they’re doing quite well, and they got a big round of funding last year.”
Arnold cited Avaya as a continuing contender in UCaaS.
“Avaya had a really good briefing [recently], and they were talking about 5,000 net new [customers] in the past year,” he said. “So for all the people who have been writing off Avaya and everyone’s poaching their customers, and there’s probably some truth to that, but they can’t lie about stuff like that. I believe them when they say, ‘We’re growing; we’re taking business away from competitors.’”
Aldea said LogMeIn is a “cool story and we can think of them as a hungry player.”
“They have developed industry-specific customer relationship management (CRM) integrations,” he said. “For example, vet clinics use very specific CRM tools and LogMeIn built integrations to those platforms. Also, insurance agents and car dealerships are other market segments that LogMeIn is aggressively growing.”
Arnold cites Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) among global contenders. Last August, ALE and RingCentral entered a multiyear partnership. It’s centered on a new co-branded cloud offering, Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral. The offering is an exclusive for ALE.
Castanon picks Deltapath among vertical-focused vendors and security-focused providers that are emerging as challengers. Last fall, Deltapath launched its Teams Gateway. It bridges a customer’s existing PSTN phone lines and PBX phone system to extend PSTN calling in Microsoft Teams.
Castanon said Revation Systems belongs among noteworthy UCaaS players.
Revation Systems’ LinkLive Banking is unified communications software hosted in the cloud. It offers banking organizations a range of capabilities including digital messaging, the ability to engage across physical and digital channels, and voice and video communications.
Foxwood says NetFortris is a successful provider. Last fall, NetFortris unveiled its first joint UCaaS offer since 2017’s NetFortris-Fonality merger. The “Comm-unity” platform combines NetFortris’ carrier-class telephony engineering experience with Fonality’s UC development expertise.
Arnold said Ooma is in the game. Last November, Ooma unveiled Ooma Meetings, a video conferencing and collaboration platform that is part of its Ooma Office Pro business phone service. Users can manage and join video meetings through the existing Ooma Office desktop app.
Last month, Mitel launched an MSP-focused model for its MiCloud Connect solution designed to help partners increase cloud adoption in the United States and Canada. The new solution, named MiCloud Connect Partner Managed, will give certified partners more control over service delivery and management, Mitel said, while boosting an MSP’s ability to sell cloud services to their customers.
Zendesk is cited by Foxwood as a contender. He said it’s equipped to meet the user where they are from an application perspective. In February, Zendesk rolled out its new messaging solution as part of the new Zendesk suite. Companies can now provide connected conversational experiences across web, mobile and social channels.
Nextiva’s latest NextOS platform provides fully integrated communication apps along with AI, workflow automations and more.
The pandemic has created a lot of new opportunities, said George Aldea, AppSmart partner engineer.
“Businesses have had to adopt new ways to communicate, upgrade or replace legacy systems,” he said. “I see the second half of 2021 and 2022 as a boom for tech as businesses of all sizes implement these changes. I see challenges for providers to keep up with growth and deliver on the promises of clean implementations. Most clients who replace legacy systems are used to working with a person who showed up to their sites and handled physical changes, etc. Now the question is who handles that task. IT Staff are over taxed keeping up with their day-to-day work and don’t have time to implement a new phone system. I have seen this issue delay sales.”
Nextiva’s latest NextOS platform provides fully integrated communication apps along with AI, workflow automations and more.
The pandemic has created a lot of new opportunities, said George Aldea, AppSmart partner engineer.
“Businesses have had to adopt new ways to communicate, upgrade or replace legacy systems,” he said. “I see the second half of 2021 and 2022 as a boom for tech as businesses of all sizes implement these changes. I see challenges for providers to keep up with growth and deliver on the promises of clean implementations. Most clients who replace legacy systems are used to working with a person who showed up to their sites and handled physical changes, etc. Now the question is who handles that task. IT Staff are over taxed keeping up with their day-to-day work and don’t have time to implement a new phone system. I have seen this issue delay sales.”
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerating work-from-anywhere model have dramatically impacted UCaaS providers during the past year.
UCaaS providers raced to keep up with skyrocketing demand for remote work solutions. And major market shake-ups included M&A and strategic partnerships to expand into new territories.
This is our first annual “CF List,” and the fourth if you count our previous CP lists focused on UCaaS providers. Analysts and other experts 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 Grand View Research, the global UCaaS market should exceed $210 billion by 2028. It should sustain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 24% from 2021-2028. Moreover, the growing preference for combining UC and IoT should open new growth opportunities for the market.
Forrester’s Jay McBain
“From the stratospheric rise of Zoom, to the shift to marketplaces and product-led growth models, 2020 will have left a significant and lasting impact on the UCaaS and CCaaS markets,” said Jay McBain, principal analyst of channel partnerships and alliances at Forrester.
Raul Castanon is senior research analyst with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
451 Research’s Raul Castanon
“Organizations are looking to maintain travel restrictions, extend work-from-home (WFH) policies and reduce their office environment footprint even as they begin their transition back to the office,” he said. “These factors are influencing market requirements for UCaaS, leading vendors to adapt their product and go-to-market strategies to address the requirements of the post COVID-19 workplace. The need to support a distributed workforce is raising the bar, redefining who the successful, cutting-edge providers are, with those that differentiate based on addressing the requirements of a hybrid/remote workforce, including security and privacy capabilities such as end-to-end encrypted communications, emerging as key players.”
All UCaaS Providers Have Good Stories
Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates. He said it’s a good time to be a UCaaS provider. That’s because “every company I brief with has a good story to tell.”
J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold
“No one is saying, ‘Oh the market stinks; we’re losing money and we don’t know if we’re going to make it,” he said. “And we talk to a lot of companies.”
To be successful, a provider has to have solid video and voice capabilities, Arnold said.
“Zoom had such a huge impact that all of the other collaboration vendors, particularly Microsoft and Cisco, and even Avaya and Mitel. really upped their video game because now they found themselves chasing Zoom rather than them being chased,” he said. “So this idea of what’s going to be cutting-edge is you’ve got to keep adding more and more features to the video experience. And clearly you saw that from all the big vendors as 2020 went on. So all of their announcements and certainly a lot of their acquisitions were built around making the video experience better. And normally. innovations take a long time. But in the course of a year, they’ve probably gone through two or three iterations of new rounds of features.”
Based on feedback from analysts and experts, 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 who made the cut this year.
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