Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hey, listeners, thanks for tuning in to this edition of our Metro site podcast. I'm Matt Craig. I'm the Senior Director of Product development here at Metrogy. And today I'm along with Beth Schultz, who's our VP of Research and principal analyst responsible for CPaaS and CX coverage.
She's joining me here today to talk about our 2026 CPAs Metrorank report. It's our fourth annual. So, Beth, I want to welcome you in.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Thank you, Matt. Looking forward to chatting with you.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Well, so to start this off, first, tell us what metrorank is, what's the methodology, and you know, how, how this is all all put together.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Okay, so for this year's report, we use the same criteria that we've used historically across our the cpas Metro rank across all the Metra Rank portfolio, actually.
And what we do for Metrorank is we rank the top, generally the top 10 vendors. That was the, that's what we did for CPAs this year.
And we use revenue, revenue, market share as the number one factor to be included in the ranking. So you have to have earned revenue market share within the top 10 to even be considered for the ranking.
But this isn't a ranking of, this isn't a revenue ranking.
So we, we use revenue as the gating factor. And then we take into, consider it into consideration a number of other factors. So we look at financial strength, so profitability, solvency, liquidity, operational efficiency. Those go into assessing a financial score.
And then we look at market share momentum. So that's growth in market share, you know, relative to others in the, in the market.
And I do want to give a shout out to my colleague, Diane Myers. Diane is our senior research director. She handles all of our market share analysis, our market share forecasting, et cetera. And she kind of does this piece of the metrank process.
And then we look at product mix. So, so, you know, of course, channels, APIs and channels obviously very critical to CPAAS portfolio. Historically, a lot of the revenue comes from your basic channels. But, you know, providers are really working on enhancing their offerings with AI enablement.
You know, many are working with network APIs as well, sort of and building out much, much more depth in their channel offerings. So, you know, in order to do well in the ranking, you do have to have a solid mix of features and capabilities on your platforms. And then the last criteria is customer scoring. And we look at two customer scores, Customer Sentiment and Customer Business Success.
And these scores, these, this data comes from our annual Customer Experience Metricas study.
And in that Study that's a big global study. Roughly, I don't remember off the top of my head what the count was responding. Count for this year is in the sort of in the probably 13 to 1500 range.
But anyways, these participants rate their primary providers and share their business success, their changes in their.
Whether it's revenue growth or agent efficiency or whatever business success metrics we lay out, and we pull those for inclusion in helping us determine the ranking within the Metro rank report.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Okay, great. So it's. It's basically revenue gets you to the table, the market share gets you to the table, but you really have to be strong across the board in order to do well in these Metro ranks.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: All right, so what were the providers that made the top 10 ranking this year?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Okay, so I will list these. Just. I'll list them in order of the actual ranking. So not revenue rank, but the. The ranking in the report.
So revenue plus these other factors. So we have Twilio, we have Infobit, Cisco, Route Mobile, Bird, big European providers, Asynch, Link Mobility, Telnic, which is a newcomer to our list for the year. And then Vonage and Tata Communications rounds out the top 10.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Okay, and now besides the rankings themselves, the report also includes kind of like a market landscape visualization. So what is this? Where do the providers fall in that?
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so this is something that we added this year. I think CPAS Match Rank is maybe the third or fourth report ranking report that we include this landscape in. And the idea is, so we have these providers, we have their rankings, but how can we show how they really stack up against each other in a visual way? So what we did was we created what we're calling this landscape, market landscape. And we looked at three categories. So three, three category scores, essentially. So we have a foundation score and that we plot on the X axis, and it consists of financial strength and product mix. So those foundational elements. Then we have the customer score that's plotted on the X axis, and it consists of customer sentiment and customer business success scores, as you might have guessed given the name. And then we have the market score, and that's configured by the size of the bubble. And it consists of the market share and market momentum scores.
So once we have these providers mapped across these categories, we then segment them into the leaders. So leaders have high foundation scoring, high customer scores. And the leaders in this CPAs metro rank landscape are Bird, Cisco, Route Mobile and Twilio. Those are the leaders.
Bird and Route Mobile have the strongest customer scores, while Cisco and Twilio have the strongest foundation scores.
Then we have challengers. And these are the providers. They're doing well and they just kind of fall out of that leader segment.
They're really very much still a competitive threat though. They tend to be a bit smaller in terms of market share. There is an exception in this case though. But the tendency is that they're smaller on market scoring. And then all of. So this year all of the other CPAAS providers that I didn't already mention fall into the challenger category. So there's six companies here. Infobip, Link Mobility, Cinch, Tata Communications, Telnex and Vonage.
And that's all of the vendor, all of the providers, either leaders or challengers. Which means that we had no companies that fell into the performer.
That's our third bucket performers. And these tend to be on the smaller side relatively.
But you know, they still deserve attention for having high enough market share to be included in the Metro ranking.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: But yeah, and, and that's, it's really interesting. Another way to show about how really the market share doesn't matter quite as much of whether or not they're a leader or a challenger or anything like that. It's. It's there and represented. But that doesn't play into whether or not they fall within those, those groups. It's more of how foundational they are as a company and how well they're. They're working for their customers.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: So was there anything that you didn't expect or that stood out?
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Well, let me, let me carry forward. You know, we were just talking about that landscape visual.
You know, if you would have said, oh, who's going to be in the leader segment? Just, just by nature of the company, I would have said infobip would have been in the leader segment.
It has a really strong market pres.
It's the second strongest market revenue score, market score in general.
But it, you know, it's just perfect example of what we were just talking about, Matt. It's pulled down into the, out of the leader segment, into the challenger segment based on its lower customer scores. Lower than usual for, for it to customer scores. Customer scoring is, can really make a big difference in where. What, what exact position you land up in the overall ranking as you can see here. Then where you fall on the landscape as well.
Kind of on the flip side regarding customer scores, we saw really positive customer scoring for Bird and that pulled it into the top five for the first time. So I was a little surprised by its overall positioning but again, really, really buoyed by some really strong customer scoring and then
[00:09:59] Speaker A: new.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: I think it's sort of a surprise. New to the list and off the list. So new to the list. Telmics, they entered the mix for the first time based on their revenue. Strong company for sure, but they'd always kind of fallen just below.
And the company they bumped off the list is bandwidth. And well known CPAAS provider still a very strong presence, particularly, particularly among enterprise companies. So that was a little bit of a surprise that we saw that shift there at the bottom in terms of revenue.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Okay, so you mentioned bandwidth. Kind of just, you know, missing the cut and getting leapfrogged.
You know, were there, are there any other providers that are real close to making the cut, Ones that you should be keeping an eye on?
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean from, from a net, if not necessarily from a revenue perspective, another provider to watch, say is 8x8.
It has really been.
And from not, not domestically per se, but from its focus and its presence in the Asia markets, particularly Indonesia and Singapore. Coming out of its Wave Cell acquisition of a few years ago, it's furthering its presence into Asia again through acquisition.
This year we saw it acquire a company called Maven Labs again to sort of strengthen its presence in Asia. So they're one to watch if you're looking for CPAAS services in those markets.
And then the other two, and there are a number that I include in the report, but the other ones that I'll mention, and I think it's worth worth noting, if anybody's listening to this and they know the CPAS market, they're going to be like, what about Alibaba? What about Tencent? They have a huge presence in China and yes, they do. And from a revenue perspective, each of these companies would qualify for our list for that top 10 by revenue. However, we don't, when we do our CX Metrocast study, we don't gather customer, we don't gather data from companies in China. Therefore we don't have any customer data to build our customer scores on.
And for that reason we don't include them on the list. But certainly those are two companies that are, you know, deserve watching as well.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: All right, for sure. All right.
I just have one more overall kind of question for you. You know, now that you have put out this report and you've been working on it for quite a bit, you know, this is a very meaty piece in general.
But now, looking forward, what's next for your research?
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Okay, so yes, I'll be glad that CPAS Metro Rank is published. That's a big chunk. It has taken a big chunk of time. The thing that I'm really excited about is this quarter, in about a month, I'd say we are planning on publishing our CX Assurance for AI Powered Contact Centers study.
And so CX assurance is another of my primary areas of coverage under that CX umbrell.
And this study is going to be really interesting because it's taking a look at what companies are doing to assure the performance of their AI agents. So what are they doing before they deploy those agents? What are they doing during runtime, you know, as their AI agents are interacting with their customers? And then what are they doing after the fact to sort of evaluate and assess and then how are they kind of building this into. If they are building this into a continuous loop of improvement? So just started to dig my hands into the data and doing the analysis. So really looking forward to going out to publication with this one.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: I'm very excited about that too. It's what I'm looking forward to because you did a report towards the beginning of the year, if I remember correctly on the topic. And now we're getting even more data than we had previously and more updated data. So I'm really excited to see, you know, what's coming out of that.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So we did a market overview, so just kind of went through the whole concept and you know, what types of vendors are playing in this sort of CX assurance world. So and this will, this will be the big kind of data, data push behind that.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for your time, Beth. For any of our listeners who are, you know, more interested in reading the report or, you know, want to talk to us more. Reminder, you can find all of Our met rank reportsetergy.com we're always happy to hear from you. You can reach out to us directly through email, you know, first name.lastnametrogy.com or via the contact button on our website.
But so that's all I have for now. Beth, thank you again so much for doing this and goodbye and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you, Matt.
