Description

As the North American unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market matures and competition intensifies, it is becoming increasingly important for market participants to accelerate innovation and develop sustainable growth strategies. This market analysis provides a perspective on key market trends as well as an assessment of 30 growth and innovation leaders. The Frost Radar plots the selected UCaaS providers based on a set of 10 growth and innovation criteria, which 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 the providers’ North America UCaaS installed bases is used to determine the top 30 market participants to include in this evaluation.

Both 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 both pure-cloud/multi-tenant and multi-instance platforms are taken into account when evaluating providers’ market position and innovation and growth capabilities. Certain industry classifications recognize hosted offerings as true “cloud” only when a high degree of automation is present. For the purposes of this study, we consider all multi-instance and multi-tenant hosted IP telephony and unified communications offerings to be cloud solutions. The supporting 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).