UCaaS Continues to Disrupt Traditional Business Communications

RENO, NV, January 6, 2016

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the total UCaaS market continues to grow at an annual rate of 16%, with revenues from the smaller UCaaS business suite segment growing far more rapidly than UCaaS standalone applications. The two segments currently have different sets of leading players, though ongoing feature and technology enhancements will cause a continued blurring of what is standalone and what is an integrated UCaaS business offer. Currently the larger UCaaS standalone applications market is led by Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, inContact and Genesys, while the UCaaS business suite market is led by RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage, ShoreTel and Mitel. Annualized revenues from UCaaS are now running at $4 billion. Standalone applications currently account for two thirds of the market and include videoconferencing SaaS, webconferencing SaaS and hosted contact center. UCaaS business suite accounts for a third of the total and includes private, public and hybrid service offerings. Videoconferencing SaaS is the smallest product segment within the market but is also the highest growth, with revenues growing by almost 50% per year. The US continues to account for the large majority of the UCaaS market – 71% in the third quarter – though for standalone applications the market is not as concentrated in North America as it is for UCaaS business suite.

“UCaaS continues to be a force for change within the business communications market,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “There has been a rapid rise of some disruptive new vendors and I do not expect the pace of change to slacken. Now some vendors are broadening their product offerings to provide more comprehensive solutions, examples being Cisco adding videoconferencing and voice capabilities to Spark and Microsoft adding UCaaS to Office 365. We are now entering a world of next generation UCaaS where standalone is not so standalone anymore.”