Here’s what is happening in Q4 2019 in the cloud comms space of CPaaS and UCaaS (and maybe some cloud contact center (CCC) mentions too).
Zoom is going deep into the hardware space (see HERE). Zoom also made at investment in Neat to get more into hardware – a sound bar and a interactive whiteboard. Besides Neat, Zoom has partnerships with Dell, Logitech, Poly and DTEN.
Zoom is also moving into telephony space (Yamaha speakerphones), but they are doing it in stages. “GTT and Voxbone have joined the Zoom Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) program, which allows Zoom Phone customers to keep their current PSTN service provider.” Smart move.
RingCentral and Avaya have been all over the socials, blogs, and analysts’ reports. Mainly the winner is RC for buying the customer list. The losers are Avaya customers and partners. Avaya will focus on the cloud contact center piece of their business. The IX-CC will soon be on Azure. And there was a deal with IBM Cloud.
There has been a bunch of activity this year in Cloud Contact Center (CCC). TalkDesk did a deal with Mitel to sit on top of its CPaaS. TalkDesk originally was built on twilio, but twilio launched its own CCC called Flex. Amazon also launched a CCC called Amazon Connect (in 2017). So TalkDesk had to diversify.
Twilio also launched a book on how to build your own IVR. This will disrupt some companies.
Telax was acquired by Intermedia.net. Good news for my client, Telax.
Ex-Polycom CEO Mary McDowell took over at Mitel.
Vonage made the “2019 IDC MarketScape for cloud communications platforms. Vonage earned this distinction based on its API Platform and its One Vonage single, micro-services architecture, as well as its status as the only company that can integrate across three of the fastest-growing enterprise segments today communications APIs, unified communications and contact centre (CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS).” That is no longer accurate. 8×8 acquired a CPaaS platform earlier this year, so has all 3 parts. Mitel has all 3 parts. There are a number of vendors with all 3 parts: UC, CP and CC aaS.
Panterra Networks also has all 3 parts now. This week they launched CPaaS, which can be integrated with their other elements: cloud storage (Smartbox), UCaaS (Streams), collab (Teams) or CCC solutions. Panterra is HIPAA Secure and encrypted. Not many other providers can say all of that. (According to Rich Tehrani, collab platform Wire is secure, too.)
Zoho this week launched Catalyst, a secure, high-performing platform that helps you build world-class solutions at scale. It seems more and more of communications is just software that users can build on. That’s great but most software projects fail. And how many businesses have an in-house devops team?
Slack launches Workflow Builder: the simple way to streamline tasks in Slack. As NYU Prof. Galloway says, Slack directly competes with Microsoft, so has to find ways to be different. This might be one way.
Two final thoughts on the RC-Avaya deal.
One. Q Advisors notes ” While RingCentral defines Mid-Market as customers generating between $25,000 and $100,000 in Annualized Recurring Revenue (“ARR”) and defines Enterprise as customers generating greater than $100,000 in ARR, the Company’s ARPU, approximately $400 / month, is significantly lower than that of Avaya. The question still remains if a provider can truly serve the Enterprise segment without a broadband offering and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). ” It isn’t just RC that claims the Enterprise & mid-market space but has approximately $450 ARPU.
Two. Kurtz commented. “Enterprises have been slow to adopt cloud-based communication as less than 10% of total UC seats have transitioned to the cloud, with the enterprise segment even slower to adopt. With this new partnership, Avaya brings RingCentral more than 100M seats in its on-prem installed base (20-25% of all PBX seats), 120K customers (average customer size of ~1,000 seats), and more than 4,700 channel partners, enabling RingCentral a clear path into the enterprise segment of the UC market. If all of these Avaya seats converted to RingCentral premium, this would imply a ~$36B opportunity annually for RingCentral.” This is such a stupid supposition. The 4,700 partners have a business model predicated on selling and maintaining hardware. Hard to transition to just MRR from that. Those 100M total seats are mostly premise (only 600K are cloud).
There are 5M CCC that RC won’t get, since Avaya is keeping that. There is also an RC-InContact marriage that may prove slippery. [UPDATE 10/28/2019] – If RC is trying to sell to Avaya customers, what do they get? The Contact Center goes to Avaya. Zoom gets a piece. All that is left is UC or CPaaS. That isn’t going to increase the ARPU (which is at approx. $450).
In summation, customers have so many choices including Mitel, Cisco, Microsoft, Fuze, Verizon, Zoom, Vonage and whatever the NextGreatThing is. I still think Cisco and MS will take most of the Enterprise.
Bandwidth.com has made the IDC MarketScape for CPaaS. I don’t know much about their offering. Intelepeer, kandy and VoIP Innovations offered pre-built functions for customers like chatbots with AI and more. Not certain if that many businesses want to build their own – chatbots, IVR, contact center, etc. But there might be a business around building it for them and managing it. [VoIP Innovations sold to Sangoma and the CPaaS isn’t getting much attention.]
Final note on BroadWorks. From a client, ” at an event in Antwerp last week and Cisco addressed the retirement of Broadworks. The line was Broadworks will always be available for call control. The conferencing, collaboration, and contact center will be moved into the cloud and will play well with BroadCloud. However, as the guy was running through his slides call control moved to the cloud in 2021!”