One more research company put out its market leader report on UCaaS (unified communications as a service or as I call it Hosted PBX or Hosted UC or just UC).
New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group show that 8x8 and RingCentral continue to lead the UCaaS business suite market, with each having a worldwide market share of just under 13%. However, among the leaders Mitel is growing the fastest with a 60% year-on-year increase in revenue and a more than twofold increase in subscribers. Meanwhile total market revenues keep growing by over 30% year-on-year.
If this chart is any indication, Synergy RG didn't look at a big cross-section of the industry.
As I have written before, there are 2000 providers of Hosted VoIP in the US. Sure, lately the press mentions have gone up for 8x8, RC, Vonage and MITEL, but to shrink the market to just the publicity hounds seems ignorant.
Not one of these companies is doing over 10K seats per month. And this study was "global" not just US.
The last report from 8x8 was celebrating a couple of hundred seat deal. Vonage had to buy Telesphere because no one would take it seriously in the Enterprise arena. If Mitel is a leader, why has it made so many bids for Shoretel? And these are your market leaders? Seems like yet another pay for play report.
Take what you want from this paragraph of the report:
OTT UCaaS accounted for 57% of quarterly business suite revenues and private circuit UCaaS accounted for 30%, with the balance coming from hybrid deployments. North America continues to account for over 85% of worldwide revenues due to the under-developed nature of the market in other regions. Currently integrated UCaaS offerings account for just 9% of all managed and hosted business voice subscribers worldwide, leaving significant opportunity for growth.
If you are doing all of your seats OTT, can you really be a leader when one deployment on a managed circuit is at least 75 seats each? It seems unlikely. It seems like it is all about the PR and not the actual business. All about telling the story so that the market will believe it. Surprisedly, the people in our industry will believe this as much as the market will. That should tell people at the companies not on this list to hire a PR firm. Get your messaging together and start marketing -- or lose the battle.
Remember the lesson of Thinking Phones: best thing that happened to them was making MQ early.
