Description

This is an in-depth analysis of the top 21 growth and innovation leaders in the European unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market. Competition is intensifying as the market matures. As a result, it is exceedingly important for participants to accelerate innovation and develop sustainable growth strategies. This Frost Radar provides perspectives on market trends and rates the included UCaaS providers based on a set of 10 growth and innovation criteria comprised of qualitative and quantitative factors. The primary quantitative metric employed is hosted business Internet Protocol (IP) telephony/cloud private branch exchange (PBX) or UCaaS seats consumed by end-user organizations as monthly subscription services. The size of providers' European UCaaS installed user bases determined the providers to include in this evaluation; however, certain providers with comparatively large installed bases were not evaluated due to limited available information about their growth and innovation strategies.

Call control platform innovation continues, yet not with tremendous forward leaps in this maturing market. Rather, much of the development focus has shifted to the UC applications that integrate with business call control, such as meetings, messaging, mobility and, increasingly, contact centre. Developments have an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Examples include automated recording and archiving; AI-enabled captions, summaries and transcriptions of calls and conferences; contextual recommendations on calls; and mobility with single caller ID. Business process and vertical solution integration with UCaaS, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning, project management, electronic medical records, and financial services software, are likewise enabling providers to increase average revenue per user and enhance their value propositions.

Contact centre and customer experience (CX) management solutions also are a focus area for UCaaS providers. Disrupted customer experiences during the pandemic and shifting customer preferences to interact via a range of communications modalities (voice, chat, SMS, fax, email, and social media) raised awareness among end-user organisations to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology and the overall need to improve their CX capabilities. Cloud services help end-user organisations to quickly expand their capabilities and remain current with regular updates delivered from contact centre as a service (CCaaS) platforms. All of this is compelling cloud communications providers to expand their CX offerings. Today and going forward, robust CCaaS offers will be a crucial part of cloud communications suites and a competitive advantage for technology developers and service providers with strong capabilities. As the market continues to mature and competition further intensifies, growth and innovation become more challenging to achieve organically. Mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnership activities have been steady and are expected to remain common paths that providers take to boost innovation, enhance their portfolio and geographic footprint, and accelerate growth.