According to Frost & Sullivan, with demand for cloud communications rapidly increasing, there has been a surge in collaboration among platform and device vendors, technology developers, service providers, and others to launch reliable and secure hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony and unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) offerings. Those synergies are opening up opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs) to target larger organizations that have complex IT and communications requirements, and potentially enabling the North American market to achieve a revenue compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20% between 2017 and 2024, and an installed base CAGR of 23%, with an anticipated revenue of more than $17 billion by 2024.
"As businesses adapt to an ever-changing competitive environment, they require a trusted partner that can effectively assist them in their business transformation and cloud migration journeys. CSPs are responding to this market demand by integrating hosted IP telephony and unified communications-as-a-service with customer care solutions and business workflows," said Elka Popova, digital transformation vice president at Frost & Sullivan. "By 2030, programmable communications will dramatically change the industry paradigm by transforming communications and collaboration services into core components of critical business solutions."
"The net new annual users of hosted IP telephony and UCaaS are expected to increase from 5.7 million in 2018 to 11.3 million in 2024 as programmable communications help providers tap unexplored customer segments and cross/up-sell to existing customers," said Popova. "Cloud is poised to become the preferred technology consumption model within the next decade, but premises-based systems will co-exist with it for decades."
Frost & Sullivan believes CSPs must make the most of the revenue opportunities by:
- Offering integrated cloud services such as UCaaS, contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-services (IaaS), and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
- Leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), bots, machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) to enable smoother communications experiences
- Embedding UCaaS as the communications functionality in popular third-party software
- Delivering a consistent user experience across networks and devices such as PC, desktop phone, mobile device (native or app-based dialer)
- Targeting all tiers of business - large, mid-tier, and micro - with customized solutions to directly impact key business processes
- Enabling a cost-effective transition from customers' legacy systems through trade-in incentives and flexible OPEX payment plans for hybrid environments
- Building analytics and reporting capabilities to tailor services based on usage data as well as other solution performance and business metrics