Technology’s biggest UC platform vendors have spent years building ecosystems that users find difficult to leave. Microsoft, for instance, has built a whole suite of offerings from Sharepoint to Outlook to make its Teams experience fuller from a full ecosystem buy-in.
Beyond the benefits of staying, are the difficulties in leaving. Interoperability and data transfers between UC platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack have historically been challenging for enterprises, and involved a multi-step process that was fraught with risk of error.
However, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are now asking vendors to make that easier. In the US, this was highlighted by the DOJ’s case against Apple’s iMessage’s treatment of non-Apple users as a deliberate strategy to reinforce platform loyalty, and in the drafting of the now failed ACCESS Act, which proposed interoperability and data portability for tech giants.
For the EU, the Digital Markets Act was signed into law, and it marks the most significant intervention yet, designating major technology “gatekeepers” and requiring them to open their platforms to competitors for interoperability with rival services and greater data portability. It is a reasonable policy ambition. But between a regulatory mandate and genuine openness lies a significant gap, one shaped less by technical limitations than by the financial realities of how these platforms are built and valued.
This is not a story about bad actors. It is a story about two legitimate but competing forces: a regulatory framework designed to restore contestability to markets that have become structurally concentrated, and a commercial model that has rewarded ecosystem lock-in and retention.
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Why Openness Is a Complicated Ask
The EU’s Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2022 and designated six major gatekeepers – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, and Microsoft – by September 2023. The Act represents the most assertive attempt yet to resolve that tensionby demanding the companies comply with specific “do’s” and “don’ts”, with key obligations include allowing third-party interoperability,
The scale of the market helps explain why the law came into effect. Microsoft Teams alone has surpassed 300 million monthly active users. When a platform reaches that kind of critical mass, it has regulators wondering how many are there fully by choice rather than convience of staying.
To understand the complexity of the interoperability debate, it helps to understand what integration is actually worth to a platform vendor. For subscription-based technology businesses, the financial model is highly sensitive to churn. Research from Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. For vendors, reducing churn is therefore, not just a commercial priority; it is the primary driver of enterprise valuation.
By building Teams into its E3 and E5 enterprise licences, Microsoft has created a platform that is deeply embedded in day-to-day workflows. From a pure business perspective, the strategy is coherent: tighter integration means higher switching costs, which means more durable revenue.
Looking at other UC companies, you can see something similar. Cisco’s position reflects a similar logic, though through a different mechanism. Enterprise customers who have invested significantly in Webex-compatible boardroom hardware face a real capital cost if they migrate away from the platform. Although compatible with other UC platforms, some of its most important features like native AI tools work best within the Webex ecosystem.
When seeing the cost of not capturing your customers by more than one mechanism, the strategy makes sense. Zoom saw its Net Dollar Retention drop to around 98% post-pandemic as standalone video users moved on relatively easily as there were no deeper connections to the service beyond video calling. This dynamic directly saw the acceleration of its push into Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center.
These are rational business decisions. They also happen to be precisely what the DMA is designed to address.
However, Dave Michels, Lead Analyst at TalkingPointz.com, argues that the gap between regulatory intent and commercial outcome is wider than it appears, noting:
“Don’t confuse compliance with surrender,”
“The big platform providers aren’t ignoring the DMA; they are gaslighting it. Regulators will see ‘interoperability’ on paper, but it’s nearly impossible to achieve in practice. The providers have added toll booths to their garden walls.”
The DMA’s Article 7 sets out a phased timeline: basic 1:1 messaging interoperability was required from March 2024; group chat interoperability falls due in March 2026; and voice and video interoperability follows in March 2028. The deadlines are fixed. But the form that compliance takes, and whether it produces meaningful openness or a technically valid version of the status quo, remains an open question.
The Gap Between Compliance and Contestability
If the financial incentives explain why vendors are cautious about interoperability, the use of open standards demonstrates it in action. Protocols like Matrix and SIP are not experimental, they are technically mature and have been deployed successfully at significant scale. France built its government messaging platform, Tchap, on Matrix. Germany has used it for both the Bundeswehr and its healthcare sector. In both cases, these implementations work, at scale, under pressure, with security requirements that in many cases match anything the commercial giants provide.
Viable alternatives already exist, and that can be a problem, from a vendor’s perspective. Genuine interoperability between these two systems would not just create a link for some customers, it would open an exit.
As a way to argue against limits to the level of interoperability, many vendors state that there is a valid security argument to be had. Vendors have argued, with some technical justification, that interoperability requirements can create complications for end-to-end encryption, that introducing a third-party pathway into a closed system creates new potential vulnerabilities. Regulators have acknowledged the concern while remaining largely unconvinced that it justifies the breadth of restriction vendors demand.
Yet, perhaps all this talk of interoperability is slowly becoming irrelevant. As AI advances, there is also a broader question about where the real competitive frontier is moving. Michels sees the current messaging debate as, in some respects, a distraction from a larger shift already underway. Michels states:
“While regulators are fighting over blue and green bubbles, Walled Garden 2.0 is being built in the AI agent layer.”
“The next battle isn’t about whether you can message between WhatsApp and Slack; it’s about whose AI agent has the permission to reach into your data. The gatekeepers are complying with the messaging rules of 2022, but the goalposts have moved to the AI wars of 2026.”
For enterprise buyers, the shifting of those goalposts is precisely the argument for acting now, while the current regulatory window is open.
How Procurement Teams Can Navigate the Transition
For enterprise IT and procurement leaders, the regulatory environment creates a practical opportunity to build more flexibility into vendor relationships, one that does not require waiting for regulators to act.
The starting point is the RFP process. Vendors commonly structure commercial terms in ways that increase long-term dependency: BYOC (Bring Your Own Carrier) fees that make it costly to use independent SIP trunking, proprietary data formats that complicate migration, and API restrictions that limit integration with competing tools. Each of these can be addressed in contract language before agreements are signed, and the current regulatory climate gives buyers a stronger negotiating position than they may realise.
Practically, this means including interoperability clauses that require support for open standards, SIP, Matrix, or sector-appropriate equivalents. Data ownership provisions should make clear that all data generated belongs to the buyer. Portability requirements should specify that exports are delivered in structured, machine-readable formats. Exit assistance clauses, requiring vendors to maintain support during any transition period, are worth building in as a matter of course.
The compliance dimension adds further weight to this approach. By early 2025 after 4 years of reporting, financial regulators had collected over $3.5 billion in fines from firms that allowed business communications to flow through unmonitored channels. Procurement strategies that prioritise interoperability should also ensure that authorised tools carry adequate retention capabilities. The two objectives are compatible, but they require deliberate design from the outset.
For enterprise buyers, the most useful frame is not to expect the market to resolve this tension on its own, but to treat every vendor relationship as one that needs to be structured for flexibility from the beginning. In a landscape where the rules are still being written, the organisations best placed to adapt are the ones that have already built their exit options in.
