Today’s business communications market is marked by a pronounced shift toward more collaborative user experiences. Collaboration tools, such as video meetings and group chat, content sharing, and whiteboarding are used extensively, often replacing voice-only calls, across organizations, verticals, and job roles. Collaboration tool adoption has been growing for a couple of decades; however, it received a considerable boost during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing upsurge in popularity of hybrid work models. As a result of the increased importance of video and messaging within comprehensive UCaaS suites, the cloud private branch exchange (PBX) that provides call control functionality is becoming deprioritized in buyer decision-making and heavily discounted in solution bundles. The relative parity of PBX feature sets across providers is also contributing to the commoditization of telephony in modern business communications solutions.

This trend has been further enhanced by the rise of compelling unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) offerings by collaboration-centric providers, such as Google, Microsoft, and Zoom, seeking new growth opportunities beyond video meetings and group chat and creative ways to differentiate from the “old generation” of voice-centric hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony providers. Collaboration-centric decision-making in communications upgrades is favoring providers that lead with innovative meetings and messaging capabilities and offer cloud PBX functionality as an inexpensive and convenient—i.e., bundled and natively integrated—add-on.

Among collaboration vendors, Microsoft has benefited most tangibly from the widespread adoption of its Teams collaboration platform to drive sales of Teams Phone, its cloud PBX solution. Capitalizing on its expertise and market leadership in computer operating systems, productivity software, business email, directory services, and other technology areas, Microsoft has gradually established itself as a strong participant in the cloud communications space as well. Microsoft Teams, more specifically, is currently one of the most popular and widely adopted cloud collaboration solutions across businesses of varying size, industry, and geography.

Microsoft Teams is driving strong pull-through for Teams Phone, which is disrupting the cloud PBX/UCaaS market and creating both opportunities and threats for communications service providers (CSPs). The rapid adoption of Teams Phone has slowed growth for many competitor solutions, which is compelling CSPs to re-evaluate their strategies for the UCaaS market. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Direct Routing, Operator Connect, and Teams Phone Mobile programs are creating considerable opportunities for CSPs to sell public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity services and calling plans.

This study provides insights into customer perceptions and decision-making factors when selecting communications solutions and providers and, more specifically, the factors driving or restraining the adoption of Teams Phone. It compares organizations adopting Teams Phone to the total sample of organizations adopting cloud PBX/UCaaS solutions to identify key differences and similarities. Our analysis also includes projections of Teams Phone’s share of the total UCaaS market, as well as an estimated share of cloud-connected calling services of total Teams Phone seats throughout the forecast period. We also identify growth opportunities and best practices for service providers competing and/or collaborating with Microsoft in the evolving cloud communications and collaboration market.

Author: Elka Popova