Global corporations are increasingly turning to UCaaS as a comms deployment solution across multiple countries, according to industry analyst Gartner.
In its latest Magic Quadrant report into UCaaS, Gartner said the industry has now moved from an “early adopter phase” to an “early mainstream phase”. This has been driven, the report suggests, by larger companies picking up on the convenience and scalability of UCaaS, making it straightforward to deploy across multiple regions.
In response, cloud UC service providers have adapted to meet this demand. Gartner suggests vendors operating in up to 30 different countries is now common. This has favoured larger providers who have been able to expand their list of services to include professional services, project management, local telephony services, customer support and import/export authority.
Global Leaders
Consequently, the latest Magic Quadrant report saw improved ratings for the biggest vendors with widest reach across global markets. This was typified by BT being ranked as a Leader in the sector for the first time.
BT’s rise from the Challenger quadrant the year before resulted from the British telecoms giant achieving top ranking in three of the use cases analysed. These were “Large enterprises with modest UC requirements”, “Large enterprises that require a full UC portfolio” and “Multinational UC requirement”.
Luis Alvarez, CEO of BT Global Services, said: “We believe BT’s position in this latest report recognises our continued investment in our portfolio and feel this is further validation of our BT One Cloud offering and of our Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy.
“We see this as validating our strategy of offering a deep base of networks, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connectivity, Dolby high-definition voice, security, hosting and managed services to complement our UCaaS portfolio.”
Multitenant
The report also suggested there has been a shift away from offering multi-instance cloud delivery architectures to larger businesses, where each client receives its own unique software infrastructure. Although multi-instance is seen as providing better integration, security and customisation, the administration burden for vendors is high.
As vendors grow their client portfolios, the value in offering multi-instance deployment reduces. Multi-tenant deployments on the other hand, where all clients are offered the same software architecture, is much easier to administer and offers economies of scale. Clients see the benefits in cost and the ability of vendors to offer additional services.
Gartner predicts this trend will continue to see multi-tenant become the dominant service model for UCaaS.
