Regardless of which analyst group you follow, things look great for the unified communications as a service industry. Gartner expects the global $46 billion UCaaS market share to rise to more than $140 billion by 2025 based on a 25.1% CAGR. Analysts IDC and Frost & Sullivan have similar growth predictions. Upon close examination, this impressive growth can be attributed to a few reasons.
1. The pandemic and the rise of remote work—By now, everyone has experienced firsthand the effects of the pandemic on the business world. With most industries sending employees home to work, unified communications as a service adoption spiked out of necessity. While some are now returning to the office (or planning to), there’s considerable pressure from workers to remain at home and continue with online collaboration. Therefore, the need for robust work-from-home UCC solutions shouldn’t subside any time soon.
2. No large upfront capital expense for cloud-based solutions—Frost & Sullivan’s data points to a 25% CAGR for cloud-based communications services in North America. At the same time, the firm anticipates a decline of 5.4% CAGR for on-premises voice through 2022. One of the primary reasons for the increase in cloud-based comms and decrease in on-premises is the considerably lower cost of rolling out cloud solutions. In other words, today’s customers desire lower operational expenses as opposed to larger upfront capital expenditures.
3. UCaaS requires no (or minimal) training and certifications—On-premises unified communications services can be complicated, requiring solution providers to hire or train engineers for deployment and support. On the other hand, UCaaS solutions can be implemented in minutes with much less training.
4. System maintenance is eliminated with UCaaS—On-premises-based unified communications service solutions require highly trained engineers to maintain implementations, while UCaaS solutions are hosted in the cloud. Server maintenance, patching, security and more are offloaded to the UCaaS provider, freeing up engineers to focus on other tasks.
5. Ease of use improvements—UCC solutions have been around for a while now, giving plenty of time for providers to streamline interfaces and improve usability of online collaboration. Moving these solutions to the cloud has further improved ease of use. By consolidating functionality and including numerous third-party integrations natively, UCaaS platforms have never been easier to use or more powerful.
Any one of the above can positively impact the unified communications as a service market. Combined, there’s no denying that there are many reasons why UCaaS will overtake on-premises-based unified communications soon.