US claims lion's share of UCaaS market

More than two thirds of unified-communications-as-a-service sales were generated in the US in Q3, according to Synergy Research

The unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market is growing at double digits but still relies on the US for the vast bulk of sales, research has found.

According to Synergy Research Group, the global UCaaS market swelled at an annual rate of 16 per cent in the four quarters ending 30 September 2015.

Standalone applications such as videoconferencing SaaS, webconferencing SaaS and hosted contact centre - a market led by the likes of Cisco, Citrix and Microsoft - contributed two thirds of the total.

The remaining third was drawn from the UCaaS business suite segment, where players such as RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage, ShoreTel and Mitel dominate.

Despite the double-digit growth, the US still accounts for the lion's share of the UCaaS market - 71 per cent in Q3 - Synergy said.

"UCaaS continues to be a force for change within the business communications market," said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group's founder and chief analyst.

"There has been a rapid rise of some disruptive new vendors and I do not expect the pace of change to slacken. Now some vendors are broadening their product offerings to provide more comprehensive solutions, examples being Cisco adding videoconferencing and voice capabilities to Spark and Microsoft adding UCaaS to Office 365. We are now entering a world of next-generation UCaaS where standalone is not so standalone anymore."