The cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market continues to mature, with collaboration and AI taking centre stage, according to Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant.
The report evaluates 11 providers, categorising Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom as Leaders, with Visionaries including 8×8, Dialpad, and GoTo, and Niche Players such as Google, Sangoma, Vonage, and Wildix.
Gartner notes that UCaaS adoption is being driven by the need for simpler management, enhanced collaboration, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to legacy on-premises UC systems.
Strategic planning assumptions from the research suggest that by 2028, 90 percent of organisations will rely on cloud office platforms for enterprise telephony, up from 30 percent in 2025, and spend on traditional telephony platforms will fall by half.
Leaders: Consolidating Collaboration and AI
Cisco Webex continues to lead with a broad portfolio encompassing telephony, messaging, collaboration, meetings, devices, and contact centre. Gartner highlights Cisco’s strong AI integration, including AI-driven audio enhancements, meeting summaries, gesture recognition, and immersive video features.
While Cisco’s offerings suit large multinational organisations and regulated industries, SMB clients sometimes prefer lower-cost alternatives with simpler licensing.
Microsoft Teams remains the UCaaS solution of choice for organisations already invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem. With Teams Premium and the Queues app, Microsoft provides lightweight telephony and voice-only call centre features.
Gartner notes Teams’ geographic reach, especially in cloud-difficult regions, as a differentiator, alongside a growing portfolio of AI capabilities, such as context gathering, meeting transcription, and predictive insights. However, the lack of a fully integrated contact centre and limited advanced telephony admin features remain areas for improvement.
RingCentral delivers integrated telephony, messaging, meetings, and contact centre capabilities through its RingEX and RingCX offerings. Gartner observes strong adoption among organisations seeking feature-rich telephony and CCaaS-lite integration, with a wide array of third-party app integrations.
Challenges cited include service and support navigation and pricing complexity, highlighting the need for clearer licensing and contract management.
Zoom, increasingly positioning itself as a collaboration-first UCaaS provider, combines meetings, messaging, telephony, and contact centre capabilities. Its bundled AI features, including automated intent discovery, message translation, and real-time agent guidance, enhance productivity and workflow efficiency.
Gartner notes that Zoom has achieved high adoption in highly regulated sectors, including government, healthcare, and financial services, and has expanded into adjacent areas such as Zoom Calendar, Docs, Mail, and workforce management. While Zoom’s user experience is generally praised, Gartner emphasises that organisations using Zoom primarily for meetings may encounter additional complexity when navigating its growing suite of functionalities.
Visionaries and Niche Players: Innovation and Specialised Focus
Vendors like 8×8, Dialpad, and GoTo continue to explore AI-enabled telephony and contact centre integration, aiming to differentiate themselves in a commoditized market. Gartner highlights that these providers are investing in agentic AI capabilities, virtual assistants, and automated conversation summaries, though their adoption in large-scale, multinational deployments remains limited.
Niche Players such as Google, Sangoma, Vonage, and Wildix largely focus on SMBs or specific geographic regions. Google’s UCaaS offering, integrated with Workspace, benefits from AI features like real-time translation and meeting recaps but has slower innovation cycles.
Vonage emphasizes its Fusion platform, combining UCaaS, CCaaS, and AI, streamlining operations for midmarket enterprises. Wildix and Sangoma concentrate on customer-facing roles, lightweight CCaaS integration, and vertical-focused deployments, particularly in healthcare, retail, and finance.
Market Trends: Collaboration, AI, and Telephony Rightsizing
Gartner identifies several key trends shaping the UCaaS landscape:
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Collaboration-Centric Adoption – As enterprise communication culture shifts, users increasingly prefer meetings, messaging, and mobile-first tools over traditional telephony. UCaaS platforms are integrating seamless workflows to reduce app switching and increase productivity.
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AI-Enhanced Workflows – Generative AI now underpins meeting transcription, translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis, while agentic AI automates administrative tasks and provides real-time coaching in contact centre scenarios. Gartner notes that AI adoption is currently more impactful in customer-facing roles, with broader enterprise uptake expected as technology matures.
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Telephony Footprint Rightsizing – Enterprises are actively reducing traditional telephony usage, cutting redundant capabilities across UC platforms, and optimizing TCO. UCaaS telephony remains essential for specific user groups, but innovation is increasingly concentrated on collaboration features rather than call management.
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Integrated Contact Centre and CPaaS – Vendors are expanding their portfolios to include CCaaS and CPaaS, often offering lightweight call center capabilities at low or no additional cost. These integrations support internal IT help desks, SMB contact centers, and CRM-enhanced workflows, bridging gaps between core UCaaS and broader digital engagement needs.
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Platform Convergence and Extensibility – UCaaS providers now offer extensive APIs, marketplaces, and integrations with business apps, enabling unified workflows and automated communications across CRM, ITSM, and workforce management systems. This trend emphasizes flexibility and modularity, particularly for enterprises seeking custom integrations.
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Pricing and Licensing Awareness – Gartner underscores that buyers increasingly evaluate licensing transparency and entitlements as part of vendor selection. Complexity in pricing models and frequent changes can affect adoption, renewal decisions, and overall customer satisfaction across the UCaaS landscape.
Looking Ahead
When examining the data and how it reflects on their specific industry, IT leaders should take a cautious approach.
“For IT and business leaders, the quadrant should only ever be a first glance.” said Tim Banting, Head of Research & Business Intelligence at Techtelligence.
Without a clear alignment to your own use cases and business outcomes, it’s little more than a general market snapshot. Decisions made at that altitude are blind to the tradeoffs that actually determine success.”
The UCaaS market is expected to continue consolidating around cloud-first, AI-enhanced collaboration platforms, with traditional on-premises UC solutions gradually phased out. Large enterprises and very large organizations are adopting UCaaS as the default, while SMBs increasingly expect bundled, easy-to-deploy solutions. Gartner predicts that by 2028, specialized UC telephony licenses will decline significantly as organizations rely on broader cloud office ecosystems.
In this dynamic environment, vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom are leveraging AI, integration, and collaboration-first strategies to lead the market, while Visionaries and Niche Players explore differentiated approaches for targeted segments.
As hybrid and remote work remains a permanent fixture across industries, UCaaS platforms will play a pivotal role in enabling seamless communication, enhancing productivity, and supporting digital transformation.
