Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hello and welcome all. Thanks for tuning in to MetroCyte, a podcast from MetroGyl.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Beth?
[00:00:26] Speaker A: I'm Beth Schultz, Metro D's Vice President of Research.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: And I'm Diane Myers. I'm the senior research director and principal analyst responsible for our market share and forecasting service, metrocast.
The report we're going to talk about today is from our annual metrocast service where we do a deep dive on markets from across workplace, collaboration and customer experience.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Okay, so Diane, we're going to reveal our ranking of the top 10 UCaaS providers for 2024 based on this research. But let's first start with a general overview. What can you tell us about UCAAS adoption and market size?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so first of all, let's, in case anyone isn't completely familiar with the term ucas, which, you know, it happens, right? Everyone should be, you know, familiar with it. But Bucas is uc, right. Unified Communications as a service delivered from the cloud. And we, and it's not new, right. The service, these types of services have been around for, for, for a long time.
They consist predominantly of calling.
[00:01:39] Speaker C: Right.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: So, so businesses phone service in combination with meetings and collaboration.
[00:01:45] Speaker C: Right.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: So like, like messaging and chat and so forth. The adoption, when we look at adoption on a global basis, more than 50% of businesses and actually endpoints like phone endpoints are now delivered via UCaaS. And so adoption is really good.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: And obviously it has accelerated over the last five years and doing well. You know, when we look at market size, we're finishing up the 2024 to figure out how the year came in. But you know, we're, you know, we forecast that to be, you know, over 110 million seats and we expect, you know, we'll be there in the seat being a unique, did you know a user so doing really, really well still single digit growth in this market on a global basis.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Okay, great.
Now let's get into the list.
What goes into the ranking?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Yeah, so, yeah, so, so metrorank, the purpose of this report that we're going to discuss today is to take the top 10 UCAS providers based on market share. And this is market share based on their seats, not, not revenue. And, and that's the basis for inclusion.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: Right?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: So, so the top 10 and then we look at, after the market share we look at four or five additional topics. One is financial strength.
[00:03:21] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: And we, we do a scoring based on metrics. If they're a privately held company, they have an opportunity to give us those metrics.
Otherwise we take them from, from public filings we look at the product mix, right? It's a checklist, right. Do you have it, do you not? Do you partner with it? And we score from there. We, we look at momentum. How is your market share changing? How is the company growing relative to the overall market? Are you growing faster? Are you growing slower? And so that's our market momentum score. It's purely a score.
It's not left to me to figure out if you're growing better or worse. It is absolutely scoring. And then we take two categories from our studies where we go out and we survey businesses globally.
And if you are a customer, a current customer of a specific provider or vendor, we ask you then to rate them. Customer sentiment. Right. How do you feel that given provider is doing across a couple different categories? Right. And then how the business success is your company or your customer succeeding in doing well and growing revenue or reducing expenses, you know, whatever those success metrics are with the platform. So those are the categories and that's how we do the scoring.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah, and I, I really, we, I don't think we can emphasize those customer ratings enough. Right. That is really kind of unique. And one of our, the differentiators in, in terms of how we rank providers. Anyways, now let's, let's go ahead, let's tell us, tell our audience about the providers. Give us a rundown.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let me start with the, the kind of the top.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: We'll go, we'll, we'll go down the list.
And there should be no surprise in terms of the companies at the very top.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Because these are the companies that you think about when you think about, you know, leading UCAs and, you know, tend to be on a short list. So number one this year, and it is, it is new for this company, Right. They were number two last year is Cisco. And when we think about Cisco in this space and how we measure Cisco in this space, we are looking at their WebEx calling, right. So their WebEx suite, right.
So that's unique. We're not looking at stuff that they sell through their Broadworks platform or some of their legacy platforms. This is WebEx platform.
And we'll go into some more details on how they get to be number one. But let me just run down a couple of the other companies. So Microsoft is number two. And then we have Zoom and RingCentral. Those are the top four. Those are the companies that would roll off most people's tongues when they say, oh, who' and UCAAs. Those are the top four.
And then let me run through the rest of the list, but those are worth kind of just highlighting. We have Verizon 8x8, Vonage, Gamma, who is new to the list this year. Gamma is a British company with really growing, growing strength and market share coming out of Europe, Goto and Nextiva. So those are our top 10 providers.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: You know, obviously UCAS is really a crowded market. You know, you've got those top players, then you've got so many others. So how secure are those positions? Sort of in the bottom third of this year's ranking as we look out to 20, 25 and 20, you know, and beyond any potential sort of usurpers to keep an eye out for in 2025.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, Gamma is new, right. So they, they've definitely popped in into the top 10 this year. So that's, you know, you know, that was one.
[00:07:04] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: So you never know.
[00:07:04] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: It's very, very close when we definitely talk about the, you know, when we get to the bottom third and then even the ones below them.
[00:07:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: So, gosh, you know, ones to always kind of. There's another company that some people might not be familiar that with. It just kind of missed that mark this year. It's a company called Wildix. W I L D I X.
They're, you know, they're, they're growing, they're, they're doing some interesting things. You always have Dial Pad, Intermedia, Sangoma, Windstream is in the mix, but that company has been de emphasizing their UCAS service in favor of a lot of the initiatives around just their fiber. So, so they're kind of in that mix, but they're just not as emphasizing it as much. So not growing like they had been a few years ago. You got Fusion in that mix. But I think, you know, when we think about, you know, the list below, then I really think about Intermedia, Dial Pad, Wildix. Those are the three that I am keeping an eye on a little bit more closely than some others.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Okay, now you've been tracking the UCAS market for years. Did anything surprise you as you worked on this ranking? Anything change your view of the year ahead?
[00:08:19] Speaker B: No, nothing. You know, gosh, there was nothing that really stood out as a singular item.
[00:08:25] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: I think what stood out for me, and I was just talking to someone the other day about this as we're, you know, we're writing the report and working on things, is Cisco.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: So Cisco last year was number two. Cisco, you know, has obviously a lot of strength and is a kind of a bellwether in the Collaboration market for a long time.
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Whether we think about on prem and then with meetings with WebEx and then growing into to the calling piece in the cloud. And this year what stood out to me is the, you know they have the product piece, right. They've got all that down. They're really strong financially.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: You know them and Microsoft are just the, you know the, you know just have really great balance sheets and income statements on the financial side. But Cisco's customers really, you know, especially on the customer sentiment and the customer business success they were, they didn't receive the top score they see right below that but they just, that really stood out to me was how much the customers this year in the past year really, really rating Cisco quite, quite well. And so to me that shows that they've done some significant, they've had some significant improvements and they, they're doing some of the right stuff to really have customers that are kind of happy. Right. So and then I would say so that's very unique to like that was kind of one I hadn't expected coming in that Cisco would kind of bubble up to number one a little bit ahead of Microsoft. But on the product side there isn't a lot of changes. Right. We don't see a lot going on in terms of video meetings calling. These are kind of stalwart productivity tools.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: That most employees have access to. But it's just the continued investment in AI and we do think about AI a lot more on the customer experience side and what it can do in the contact center. But, but there are some really great tools and I, you know even us internally up to Metro G are continuing to use them and take advantage of them in terms of just the collaboration.
[00:10:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: And to do, doing you know, not just within meetings but also within chat and, and I think that's where it's just this, you know, it doesn't have to be big bursts of new development, it's just this continued activity and inclusion of AI into these tools that we're using and I think that's probably the one thing that we'll just continue to keep an eye on.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it'd be interesting just to see how as you talked about we're using some of these tools and just really be interesting to see the development in use of AI related tools for collaboration.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: And yeah, and I would say one other thing to kind of is the, in the continued interest in using single vendor solutions across the collaboration and the customer side, the customer experience side and what companies can benefit from that and does that does that pull more of the CX side or does it pull more of the collaboration side? We haven't, don't have any conclusion, conclusive data on that.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: That says, oh, I start with this and I pulled the other piece in, but just in terms of differentiate, not differentiation, but competitive advantage is, you know, can I leverage the increasing need for a common platform, common tool set and does that tend to shift some of these companies one way or the other. And I would say in the next couple years, we'll see if that actually plays out.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Okay, so that is a good place to wrap up or end on. But before we say our final goodbyes, Diane, just quickly, what's, what's next for you in the Metrocast service and Metroranks for 2025?
[00:12:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: So right around the same time, right. We are also publishing our fourth quarter market shares, our updated forecasting reports. So those are, they're all coming out at the same time.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Is this report.
So those are important to look at. You know, look what's happening with trends and market shares. But also our large customer experience study.
[00:12:42] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Our adoption market trend study that will be coming out in April. We're fielding it, we're finishing it up, we're cleansing the data. And so that will be the other big thing to look at, look for in the coming weeks.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: All right, great. Exciting stuff. Audience, as always, we're really happy to hear from you. So feel free to reach out to us via the contact button on the Metro G website on behalf of the Metro G team, goodbye till next time and take care, everybody.
