Broadsoft did a global survey of UCaaS penetration.
"The survey of 129 global service provider and industry leader respondents revealed cloud UC market penetration could grow 3x in the large enterprise segment, 7x in the mid-market segment and almost 5x in the small business segment by 2020."
Globally they surveyed 129 providers, which is less than half of just its base of US customers, about a third of its global clientele and about 5% of Hosted VoIP providers in North America. A small sample.
"For small businesses--those with fewer than 100 employees--UCaaS will make up 48 percent of the market by 2020, up from 10 percent currently. For mid-market businesses (100 to 999 employees), market penetration will grow from 5 percent in 2015 to 37 percent in 2020, and in the enterprise segment, it will be 20 percent by the end of the decade, up from 6 percent today." [eweek]
I wonder if defines UCaaS. Because to some, Office365 with Skype for Business is UCaaS - and that has more than 50 million users. Slack presents quite a few components of UC and now that SfB enables calling on Slack, will that count as UCaaS?
Broadsoft is 17 years old this week. Penetration in mid-market is 5%. But in just 5 more years that number will increase sevenfold? It might. But it will likely be due to factors that are not being considered right now. Cisco Spark, HCS, Microsoft, Slack, Google for Work, Citrix, Switch.co, and Dell are just a few players that jump out at me as being able to take market share in the UCaaS space.
How hard would it be for Freeconference.com to start offing a freemium UCaaS service that Dave Michels is talking about here?
These predictions over the years have proved fruitless. It's almost like the UCaaS space has a product that doesn't have a market yet. You have to explain to people that they are thirsty and that this is the answer.
The stats on mobile only are huge. "42 percent of respondents said they believe that more than half of UC interactions for businesses of all sizes will occur via mobile devices by 2020, while one-third of small businesses will opt for mobile-only UCaaS/Hosted PBX solutions, eliminating their need for desk phones." [channelvision]
So if mobile is big and getting bigger, why are most ITSPs still pushing desk phones? This interaction actually stalls sales.
Do ITSPs have to be MVNOs as well? Do they have to create their own mobile apps? Or co-op one that already has sharel, ike WhatsApp or Snapchat?
Selling UCaaS is tough. You have to educate the prospect. You have identify business process pain points. You have to define work flow. It is not like selling telecom at all.
If these predictions are going to come true, UCaaS will end up defined by a non-telecom entity I think. It won't be the Hosted PBX that we have seen for the last 10+ years. Especially if it has to be mobile-centric.
Will it be browser based like Panterra? or will it be an app on the phone, tablet and desktop? Will it be just an integration between apps that lets users share one address book, one call log, one history, one inbox?
Will phone numbers even be used? Or will it all be email addresses and profiles? This BI article, regurgitates what "Facebook Messenger boss David Marcus wrote that 2016 will be the year when phone numbers show real signs of death." Yeah, I guess he missed the memo when SIP was going to replace phone numbers too. I was promised tat ENUM would have mapped telephone numbers to SIP or e-mail addresses in DNS by now, which would solve some HD Voice issues. But like the flying car, not just yet.
It will be a hodge podge. If WebRTC comes through, every app can be voice and video enabled. With Chrome and Netscape plug-ins doing everything from UC-One to wiping out any mention of Trump or all ads, it will be a plug-in that gives us UC on the desktop. Just how will that correlate to a mobile device? We'll see. With Twilio offering such an elastic platform for voice and the way AWS is being used as a computing platform for Hosted PBX, we are just getting started.
