Wednesday, May 21, 2014

The UC/VoIP Scorecards

As it turns out, in February of 2013 (just last year) Infonetics stated:

"Analysts predict that seats for hosted VoIP will double between 2012 and 2016. The Infonetics Research study gave way to other attention grabbing predictions. By 2015, the VoIP services market will peak at around 74.5 billion dollars.
With that increase on the rise, managed PBX VoIP service will double by 2016.

In a twitter exchange with Infonetics analyst Diane Myer, I failed to realize that the study was a year old. But in a year, they gave up on that prediction.


Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2014 North America Business VoIP Service Scorecard:


"The top hosted VoIP providers in North America are 8x8, West IP, Comcast, and Verizon."
West provides a Cisco-based solution. "AT&T and Verizon both offer Microsoft Lync, Cisco HCS, and other hosted options."
"The competitive landscape for hosted VoIP services continues to be impacted by the traditional UC vendors, leading to fragmentation."
"Verizon, XO, AT&T, and Windstream are the leading IP connectivity providers in North America (SIP Trunking)"
"The IP connectivity market is driven by SIP trunking and led by a handful of strong providers followed by a large number of companies competing in a market where differentiation is difficult."


I wonder about these research projects. I know they are pay to play but what about the other SIP Providers: Intelepeer, Broadvox, AireSpring? How is Thinking Phones a Magic Quadrant winner but not on this list? Yet made a list that Diane Myer presented at Metaswitch Forum?


In other research studies, "New fourth-quarter data from Synergy Research Group show that the UCaaS business suite now accounts for 8 percent of all managed and hosted business voice subscribers thanks to an annual growth rate of almost 30 percent." [Source: CP]

"In the fourth quarter, UCaaS business market leaders by revenue were 8x8, ShoreTel and RingCentral, who combined to take 36 percent of the market. By subscribers, Fonality, Vocalocity and Mitel join the market leaders. In the hosted business VoIP and managed on-premise IP PBX segments, there is no one clear market leader, with NTT, AT&T, Verizon, BT and Orange all having similar scale operations; following them are a long list of other traditional telcos." [source=CP]

More on this UCaaS study here.


In still another research study, "Revenue in the unified-communications-as-a-service market (UCaaS) is expected to nearly double in just five years. That comes from MarketsandMarkets, which in a new report says UCaaS revenue will rise from $13.1 billion in 2014 to more than $23.3 billion by 2019. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 12.2 percent." [source: CP]


The InfoWeek UC survey is out and the summary is available here. The highlights are: 6 UC Trends to watch [infographic] from an InfoWeek/XO survey of 488 business. Among those deploying UC, 40% are keeping it on-premise with the IT team. 4 key points: Security, Mobility, UX (user experience) and collaboration. [The abstract is here.]


As many smart folks were telling me, it is Microsoft versus Cisco. Avaya is losing ground.


For me, a big take-away is that premise based is a mindset that is NOT going away. And recognize that buyers and users have used UC components - Skype, Google, Office365-Lync, 8x8, RC, Webex, GoToMeeting, Join.me - and that these apps are being used as reference points when comparing UC platforms. Only about half the respondents want a single vendor solution; the other half want best-of-breed with inter-op. (These are the dreamers!)


What is UCaaS? See the infographic answer.


ShoreTel's 3Q2014 numbers show HPBX up 24%

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