VoIP Gateways Article

The global VoIP services market is poised for a 9.87 percent compound annual growth rate between this year and 2021, according to new data from Technavio.

The Technavio report, called Global VoIP Services Market 2017-2021, talks about 8x8 (News - Alert), Apple’s FaceTime, Avaya, Cisco’s Jabber, Google’s Hangouts, HipChat, IBM’s Sametime, Microsoft Skype, RingCentral, Vonage, and a variety of other suppliers. And it breaks down the market by the Americas, APAC, and the EMEA.

Of course, many of these companies are focused on the business communications market and provide an array of communications and collaboration features under what’s often referred to as unified communications. Global Market Insights says the overall UC market is poised to reach $96 billion by 2023. And it notes the expected proliferation of hosted products in this category.

Meanwhile, a 2015 BroadSoft survey indicates UC’s cloud market share will increase six fold by 2020, when it’s expected to reach 41 percent. The company adds that cloud-based UC is poised to grow by more than seven times in the mid-market arena.

Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (News - Alert) lists Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, and Avaya as the leaders. Gartner shows NEC, ALE, and Huawei as the overall UC challengers. It considers ShoreTel and Interactive Intelligence nice players. And it lists Unify as the sole visionary.

BT, RingCentral (News - Alert), 8x8, West, and Fuze are the unified communications as a service leaders, according to last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide. Gartner put Microsoft, Google, Verizon (News - Alert), AT&T, and NTT Communications (Arkadin) in the UCaaS challengers quadrant. Interoute, ShoreTel, and Star2Star are considered niche UCaaS players. And Gartner considers Mitel (News - Alert), Orange Business Services, and Vonage as the UCaaS industry’s visionaries. Meanwhile, IHS Markit in January 2017 named BroadSoft Inc. the global UCaaS platform leader, with 38 percent of the total worldwide UCaaS seats running on its platform. Many of the large service providers rely on the BroadSoft platform to power their UC services.