As the cloud communications market evolves, the challenge for partners will be to differentiate amongst a sea of 3,500 fellow resellers offering a UCaaS platform to their customers, Dom Black, Principle Analyst at Cavell Group, told attendees of BT Wholesale’s Partner Plus Live Event (BT Tower, 23rd October).
Black shared that the UK cloud communications market is expected to swell with a 10.8% CAGR over the next four years, with just under 16 million users by Q4 2028, but will also have a penetration rate of 85-90%.
This will be driven by the increased awareness of the PSTN switch off, which has risen from 40% to 79% in the past two years within the IT decision making community.
Blank said: “Service providers are telling us that year on year their proportion of wins from on-premises PBX solutions has been declining.
“Less revenue will be driven by finding organisations on legacy solutions and bringing them onto the cloud and more of it will be migrating customers from other cloud providers. This will make differentiation and value adds important.”
Not just a Microsoft world
The total UCaaS users that are Teams enabled will be 41% by 2028, a steep increase from 23% at the end of 2023. “This means that 59% will be using a different provider or no collaboration solutions at all,” added Black.
He pointed to the ground being made by Cisco and Zoom, as well as the more established cloud providers like Ringcentral and 8x8.
“All together at Cavel we are tracking 105 different organisations offering their own UCaaS platform, and 3,500 resellers in the UK market with UCaaS in their portfolio.”
The nature of Teams delivery is also set to change. Currently most licences are being delivered by Direct Routing, which will evolve over the next five years to Operator Connect being the dominant solution. This won’t invalidate Direct Routing for more complex use cases.
“Overall, there are big opportunities with Teams,” said Black. “The challenge is of course making money on it and one again the solution is around differentiating and finding solutions that add value to that ecosystem.”