Additional features and service offerings: Fernandez says a trend to watch is the integration of more and more services under the UCaaS umbrella. For instance, the biggest trend that Gartner is seeing right now is the addition of customer service functions to UCaaS, because it has an external-facing, potentially revenue-generating element.
Lund also cites contact center integration as increasingly important, as well as “anything and everything AI.” In UCaaS, artificial intelligence is used for everything from noise cancellation and real-time transcription to meeting scheduling and business process automation, with more AI-driven features being added all the time.
Pricing: UCaaS is no different than any other business purchase: You want to shop around among the various vendors. Because they are on-demand, UCaaS solutions are offered as a monthly or subscription. In comparing UCaaS solutions, see what is included in the basic service and how much additional services cost. What could start out as an inexpensive subscription fee can quickly add up if you have to pay for extra features.
Leading vendors for unified communications as a service (UCaaS)
To help you begin your research, we’ve highlighted some of the leading providers in the UCaaS space, with brief descriptions of their strengths and shortcomings. Inclusion in this list is not a buying recommendation, nor is exclusion a sign not to buy.
8×8: 8×8 is a global provider of cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes, from small to extra-large enterprises. It offers what it calls “experience communications as a service,” or XCaaS, which provides a portfolio of services including voice/telephony, video, chat, contact center, and APIs, with UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS components integrated into a single platform.
Cisco Systems: Cisco is the leader in the networking equipment space, and unified communications is a natural fit. Its UCaaS strategy is built around its Webex platform. The vendor offers a broad portfolio of collaboration services, including voice, video, messaging, presence, conferencing, data content, and mobility, enabling workers to connect and collaborate anywhere, on any device. Cisco has a massive network of 62,000 channel partners worldwide.
Google: Google’s telephony, conferencing, and messaging services (Google Voice, Google Meet, and Google Chat) are offered under its Google Workspace platform, which also includes email, calendar, storage, and shared documents in an integrated workspace. While Meet and Chat are included with all Google Workspace plans, Voice is an add-on service, available in only about a dozen countries. Google Workspace products are not compatible with legacy landline phone systems, but they do interoperate with newer meeting room hardware from Cisco, Zoom, and others.
Microsoft: Other than Zoom, no company gained more from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns than Microsoft. Its Teams messaging and meeting app had the advantage of being bundled with the market-leading Microsoft 365 collaboration suite (which includes the Office apps and SharePoint), so it cost Microsoft 365 customers nothing to adopt. (But in mid-2024, due to legal action from the European Union over what the EU saw as monopolistic practices, Microsoft unbundled Teams from Office globally.)
Microsoft went into overdrive with Teams, adding a host of meeting and chat features and offering a telephony option, Teams Phone, as an add-on. In 2022, the company expanded its reach, introducing a digital contact center solution that brings together contact center, unified communications, and customer service capabilities in a single, integrated on-demand platform.
Like most Microsoft products, Teams works best within the context of Microsoft’s environment and doesn’t play too well with others. MacOS users in particular have complained about a lack of feature parity between the Mac and Windows versions of Teams, a broad issue across all Microsoft products.
RingCentral: Unlike some other providers on this list, for which UCaaS is one of many businesses, unified communications is all RingCentral does. It supports every global region through partnerships with AT&T, British Telecom, Mitel, Telus, and Vodafone, among others. Focused on providing a cohesive, single platform to customers, RingCentral also offers targeted, vertical-specific services. The company claims the highest levels of reliability, with 13 consecutive quarters of 99.99999% availability.
Zoom: A relative newcomer in this space, Zoom exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and has become the world’s most popular audio- and videoconferencing product. Its offerings include voice/telephony, meetings, messaging, and contact center. With 8,500 global channel partners, it serves several vertical markets — healthcare, government, education, and financial services — and has its eyes on manufacturing, retail, energy, and legal. As a newer UCaaS vendor, Zoom does not support legacy phone systems but does work with a variety of modern phones and meeting room devices.
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