Growth Opportunities in the North American UCaaS Market

Macro-economic and socio-political trends have had a considerable impact on the North American UCaaS market in the past four years. The COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns triggered a massive shift to remote and hybrid work, disrupted supply chains and business models in many industries, and highlighted the need for digital transformation. Without much time for post-pandemic recovery, many economies have now been affected by the Russo-Ukrainian war, which has further disrupted fuel and food supply chains and has contributed to rising inflation, increased consumer and business anxiety, and a pervasive economic slowdown. While the US and Canada have been less impacted by the war than their European counterparts, North American providers have also experienced lengthier sales cycles, reduced deal sizes, and an overall increased caution in technology investment decision making. Despite adverse macro-economic and socio-political conditions, and somewhat contrary to supply-side anecdotal evidence, Frost & Sullivan data collected in January 2023 indicated a positive outlook on communications spending with slightly more than one-half of North American IT/telecom decision makers expecting their organizations communications budgets to increase. In fact, one-quarter of survey respondents reported that political and macro-economic events are accelerating their overall digital technology investments. The North American UCaaS market is expected to remain on a steady growth trajectory. Evolved work models are among the leading drivers for cloud communications adoption. Organizations embracing flexible work styles and supporting a large number of remote and hybrid workers are leveraging UCaaS and cloud collaboration solutions to enable flexible and cost-effective connections among employees and between employees and various external parties. Untapped use cases among frontline workers and mid-market and large organizations, as well as upsell opportunities driven by AI-powered services, contact center features, vertical solutions, next-generation mobile services, and fee-based complementary services (e.g., call recording, archiving, push to talk, reporting, and analytics) are going to drive continued UCaaS adoption and incremental revenues. From the supply side, new provider models, value propositions, and sales motions, as well as rapid, primarily AI-driven innovation, will play a key role in addressing an expanded array of use cases. The continued launches of integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solutions will enable providers to not only generate incremental revenues in the adjacent CCaaS market, but also address additional personas within the organization with differentiated capabilities provided at premium, yet compelling prices levels. 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 market analysis provides valuable insights on UCaaS market growth drivers and restraints, competitive factors and growth opportunities. It can be leveraged by market participants to develop sustainable growth strategies. Author: Elka Popova