Description

As the North American unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market matures and competition intensifies, it is increasingly important for market participants to accelerate innovation and develop sustainable growth strategies. This Frost Radar™ analysis provides a perspective on key trends as well as an assessment of 29 growth and innovation leaders. The Frost Radar™ plots the selected UCaaS providers based on a set of 10 growth and innovation criteria that 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 a provider’s UCaaS installed base in North America was used to determine the top 29 market participants to include in this evaluation. However, certain providers with comparatively large installed bases have not been evaluated because of limited available information about their growth and innovation strategies.

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 pure-cloud, multi-tenant, and multi- instance platforms are considered when evaluating providers’ market position and innovation and growth capabilities. For the purposes of this study, Frost & Sullivan considers all multi-instance and multi-tenant hosted IP telephony offerings to be cloud PBX 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, or Oracle Cloud).

This Frost Radar™ does not include customer premises-based multi-instance solutions, hosted single-tenant solutions, or cloud VoIP services that primarily target consumers and residential users (e.g., Google Voice, Ooma Telo, or Vonage for Home).

For the purposes of the Frost Radar evaluation, in bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) deployment scenarios, UCaaS seat credit was given to the UCaaS application provider and not the PSTN connectivity provider. In scenarios in which the BYOC provider enables a full- featured cloud PBX seat to provide PSTN connectivity for a third-party UCaaS user, both the UCaaS and PSTN connectivity provider receive credit for the seat.

In the case of resale partnerships (e.g., RingCentral partnerships with AT&T and Avaya), both parties receive credit for the installed UCaaS seats. This approach allowed Frost & Sullivan to assess and represent each provider’s growth capabilities more accurately.

Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to reveal their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™ considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.