Synergy Research Group’s analysis of new Q2 data shows Microsoft and Zoom have grown their UCaaS market share by 40% this year.
As a result, Microsoft and Google are now level-pegging with around a 10% total share of the market.
The marketplace itself has increased by 20% this year, which suggests a huge improvement for both companies compared with their pre-pandemic market shares in 2019.
Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst, said: “Across all segments, the Covid pandemic helped to accelerate the transition away from on-premise PBX and towards UCaaS.
“This provided a big boost to specialist UCaaS vendors, with RingCentral being strong across the board, while Microsoft does particularly well in the mid-market and Zoom is the main challenger in large enterprises.
“As the UCaaS boom continues, one interesting recent development has been the rise of so-called BYOC (Bring Your Own Carrier) solutions.
“BYOC UCaaS enables enterprises to utilize their existing UCaaS or Hosted PBX investments within a collaboration platform, without the need of ripping and replacing what is currently deployed.
“We forecast strong growth for both UCaaS & BYOC UCaaS over the next five years.”
The subscriber base for RingCentral has also grown by 24% in Q2, allowing it to maintain its market share of around 21%.
Cisco, 8×8, and LogMeIn also upped their subscriber base, although their market shares remained more or less the same.
Although Dialpad ranks much further down the leaderboard, its growth rate was way above the market’s overall growth rate.
The total number of UCaaS subscribers is now over 21 million, doubling since the beginning of 2020.
According to the report, the worldwide market is dominated by the US, which has nearly three-quarters of the total number of UCaaS subscribers.
The UK and Germany account for the next largest numbers in the marketplace.
Market growth is strong in all regions, but market development remains in the early stages for most countries.
The UC market is predicted to hit $365.2 billion by 2030, according to Market Research Future.
Cavell Group shared its data this month on the cloud communications market, which shows it has grown by 2.3 million users in six months.
Interpreting the Findings
There are a number of readings to take from these findings. On one level, the numbers speak for themselves, but they also provide valuable evidence of growth in major companies where shadows of doubt are often lurking.
Let’s start with Microsoft. The technology giant has made enormous headway since 2019, which in some ways isn’t a surprise given the various accolades and achievements it has collected along the way.
Recently, it announced it had accumulated 12 million PSTN users, which is sizeable and outstrips its PSTN calling competition. Having said that, the number is dwarfed by its overall number of Teams users, which it announced as being 270 million back in January.
There is no doubting the many successes of Microsoft Teams, but it hasn’t been plain sailing, and it has had to keep regularly checking over its shoulder for the likes of Slack, Zoom, Webex, and more. In fact, as the recent data shows, RingCentral is the established king of the UCaaS hill, which Microsoft will be looking to usurp.
Moving onto Zoom. Zoom has gone from hero to the familiar face standing in the corner of a room telling the same story it did yesterday and the day before. That might be a bit unfair, but to some extent, that is Zoom’s worry.
In the pandemic, Zoom became a household name. It was associated with quizzes, reuniting friends and family, and providing workplaces with an alternative to face-to-face meetings. The secret was video conferencing, but it’s not so much of a secret anymore.
The problem is they can’t keep reinventing the wheel, so they are pushing to become associated with Chat tools and other collaboration software, elbowing in on Microsoft’s and Google’s slice of the market.
Recently the CFO of Zoom, Kelly Steckelberg, announced that Zoom is targeting a revenue of $10bn per year. That’s a very large ambition when you consider that only four SaaS companies have an annual revenue as high as that. The company was also licking its wounds recently when it had ‘disappointing’ Q2 results.
These figures uncovered by the Synergy Research Group, however, show that Zoom has clearly been progressing since the pandemic.
Its 40% market share spike this year may well be in part due to its latest marketing efforts or simply because being a famous video conferencing platform is not such a bad thing.
