Key Strategies to Sustain Growth in a Transforming Market
The North American hosted IP telephony and UCaaS market continues to expand at a steady pace, creating significant growth opportunities for providers with differentiated solution offerings, robust platforms and architectures, and effective go-to-market strategies tailored for specific customer segments. Both demand and supply factors are driving market growth.
Most businesses have developed a solid understanding of the cloud model benefits and are evaluating cloud services as part of their communications and broader IT upgrade projects. The rapidly evolving nature of work, shifting technology requirements and the need to stay afloat despite ever-more fierce competition are compelling IT/telecom investment decision makers to look for advanced communications solutions delivered via more flexible consumption models. The growing number of remote and mobile workers, the influx of Millennials into the workforce, and the simultaneous globalization and localization of business are creating strong demand for cloud services that deliver operational efficiencies, productivity benefits and a competitive edge.
An increasing variety of hosted IP telephony and UCaaS offerings is providing viable options to businesses of different size, vertical industry and technology requirements. Improving VoIP and cloud services quality, reliability and security are instilling confidence in buyers to drive hosted IP telephony and UCaaS penetration beyond early adopters.
However, businesses are only gradually moving their communications and IT workloads to the cloud. They are taking time to carefully assess the unique benefits and challenges of migrating different software workloads, users (e.g., by function) and business sites to cloud services. Continually evolving technologies and service provider models as well as the constantly changing competitive landscape due to ongoing M&A activity are deterring more conservative decision makers from making a final commitment and compelling businesses to apply greater scrutiny when selecting their solution and provider.
Research Scope
This study provides and in-depth analysis of the North American hosted IP telephony and UCaaS market. It identified market growth drivers and restraints and provides installed base and service provider revenue projections until 2024. Unit estimates and forecasts are presented in terms of installed users (also referred to as seats), which are roughly equivalent to software licenses and endpoints/stations as of the end of any given year.
Research Highlights
Revenue forecasts for hosted IP telephony are based on an average recurring monthly charge incurred by enterprise customers on a per-seat/per-user basis. Monthly recurring charges generally include private branch exchange (PBX) functionality, local and long-distance calling, and any additional features and applications (voicemail/unified messaging, automated attendant, conferencing, etc.) purchased by customers as part of the hosted IP telephony or UCaaS bundle.
Our revenue forecasts do not include one-time equipment costs-such as those of IP handsets, routers, switches or gateways-incurred by enterprise customers. Certain equipment costs may, however, be part of total revenues, if the service provider is leasing or renting the equipment and its cost is not itemized on the monthly invoice. Installation and other one-time services revenues are included.
Key Conclusions
The study encompasses both multi-tenant and multi-instance hosted IP telephony and UCaaS solutions.
A key element of this study is the discussion of best practices and key growth strategies. Market participants can use this analysis to adjust their product roadmap and business models to compete more effectively in an increasingly dynamic market.
