ETR recently hosted an industry panel featuring IT executives from healthcare, software development, hospitality and entertainment, and global industrials sectors, providing feedback on data and themes explored in ETR’s recent Observatory report on UCaaS tools and the accompanying Market Array data set. Panelists discuss the continued utility of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) post-pandemic, concerns around integration and compatibility, the impact of AI, vendor-specific challenges and preferences, and the future of UCaaS innovation.
The panel was designed to solicit further feedback on data and themes explored in ETR’s recent Observatory report on UCaaS tools and the accompanying Market Array data set. Reach out to your ETR service rep to gain access to the full suite of ETR Market Array data sets, including endpoint protection platforms (EPP), identity and access management (IAM), and business intelligence (BI) and reporting, as well as upcoming machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI).
Vendors Mentioned: 8x8 / Avaya / Amazon (AWS Chime) / Cisco (Webex) / Dialpad / Five9 / Genesys / Google (Workspace) / InContact / Microsoft (Teams) / RingCentral / UiPath / UJET / Vonage / Zoom
Key Takeaways
1. Panelists saw UCaaS operations largely modernized in the years leading up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have broadly transitioned away from phone-based systems to modern collaboration platforms. Consolidation has occurred to a degree, but most still juggle multiple vendors. Panelists feel the space has largely plateaued but look forward to future innovation.
2. Larger players like Microsoft have cornered the market. Teams is praised for its breadth of features, broad integrations, and comprehensive licensing options. Google is hanging in there as well, but its offer draws more user critique than Microsoft’s and has more perceived limitations in functionality.
3. Zoom’s simplicity and consolidated interface make it a perennial user favorite. That said, current market conditions may force some companies to trim Zoom licenses at renewal or shift to Microsoft Teams, leveraging existing enterprise-wide contracts. Cisco is still an established player in the space but needs to fully capture the transition from hardware-based telephony to SaaS.
4. Panelists mention a gap in current telephony offerings. One believes that, despite lackluster collaboration features, RingCentral can serve as a niche within a broader UCaaS strategy if they introduce more AI-powered features on top of their relatively sophisticated international telephony capabilities.
5. There is skepticism around pure plays and smaller players originating from the IP telephony space like Vonage and 8x8. “They were in the market before the other players, and they never really capitalized on that during the pandemic. They're very complex for the average user, more complex than they need to be, and were never really focused on features and functionality.”
6. Panelists are enthralled with the potential of AI integration into call centers and customer service. Broadly, all seek continued innovation to improve productivity and customer experience.
Selected Commentary
- "I see the industry continuing to grow with different components: call center aspects, customer service, AI, and bots. But I do see it sort of plateaued where it is right now. I think people have already engaged the product that was rapidly accelerated due to COVID, and now they're just continuing that. In our case, we were a 100% on site shop every single day, and now you have a hybrid environment, so you need those tools for collaboration wherever you happen to be."
- "We started with Zoom, and we stayed [with the Zoom platform]. I think a single pane of glass, especially for the user who's not technologically savvy, makes a huge difference. You have one app that has chat, web, and phone all integrated under a single platform. It’s just a lot easier to collaborate. And what I think is also service reliability; while others had various outages throughout the pandemic, we didn't have a single outage on the platform. That was pretty unique, at a time where people were growing at scale by the minute. Because of that, we felt to stay with the platform. I do think that call center integration is important. I would have liked that the Five9 deal would have went through. The fact is is that you can't predict everything, but just the same, I'm hopefully optimistic that further consolidation of space will happen."
- "We just found that Zoom seemed to work better and more reliably in that sort of environment for us than Teams did. So we have this hybrid model, where we use Teams for the majority of our collaboration, but we use Zoom for our room-based collaboration, which is pretty extensive in our environment. And then of course, once we moved to virtual that became less of an issue, but we still have some Zoom usage hanging out there."
- "Zoom cost is incremental. You have to make a hard decision when you're under pressure from a spending standpoint to say, yeah, we need functionality that we may have available to us under our current Microsoft agreement—whatever that agreement looks like—but we're going to choose to do something different, or something that will drive incremental spend, because we think the functionality is better for us. Even if you have Google, it would be interesting—because I've been through this in a prior life, too—when you're using Google, you have to then look at how you distance yourself from certain Microsoft products that are competitive or redundant, and try to reduce or eliminate the cost. Otherwise, you're paying for redundant cost. So I think Microsoft has a big advantage, in just where they're positioned in many IT organizations, in many IT shops. I think that financially, number one, is a big factor—at least that's been in my calculus in a number of different scenarios. "
- "I don't think there's really a case for Vonage or 8x8. I think that they were in the market before the other players, and they never really capitalized on that during the pandemic. I can't necessarily see a fundamental change in overview, that people are going to go to one of these platforms. I've tried both of them. They're very complex for the average user, more complex than they need to be, and were never really focused on features and functionality."
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