Voice is a Small Part of Unified Communications

Value and competition pose major problems for public network unified communications service providers, in part because voice services contribute relatively little to overall unified communications value and revenue.

And, historically, much of the demand is supplied by third party application, managed service or infrastructure providers. 

Business UCaaS often is provided by third parties and the market potential is bounded by the number of firms that can justify a UCaaS solution rather than owning their own switches. The other complication is that UCaaS includes both a “do it yourself” and a “services” segment, as enterprises often own their phone switches while smaller entities buy a managed service.

Consider the conferencing segment of unified communications. Audio conferencing arguably has been led by third party managed service providers, not telcos. 

A reasonable estimate of potential market value is that the global business phone system market, plus UCaaS alternatives, in 2014, was less than $2 billion. If every customer switched to UCaaS, that might suggest a potential global business voice market between $2 billion and $3 billion.

source: Global Market Insights 

So all the rest of UC revenue is something else: conferencing services and gear, access connections, messaging services or systems. The voice function, as such, is a small part of the overall UC market. 

Though historically dominated by enterprise DIY deployments and small business managed services, the big boom in video conferencing has been captured by third party services such as Zoom not traditional communications service providers. 

By some estimates, UCaas revenues in 2020 are about $16 billion. Others estimate revenue at $48 billion or higher amounts.  

Estimates often vary because different products are included in the definition. Some analysts consider access services used to support UCaaS--such as SIP trunks--as within the category. Others do not. 

The clear takeaway is that business voice revenues are a small part of overall unified communications demand, value and spending.