Constellation ShortList™ Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

About This Constellation ShortList™

UCaaS represents a comprehensive engagement infrastructure with native channel and collaboration applications to provide a more sophisticated cloud-delivered modern, digital communications platform.. Increasingly, UCaaS solutions focuses on communications as a mode of collaboration across flexible and configurable digital channels to match the evolution of work styles and spaces. These core functions of communications must include voice and telephony; meeting and conferencing; messaging; chat and mobile communications; dynamic collaboration; and customer-facing communication applications such as integrated contact centers, service, support, and help desk workstreams and knowledge content curation.

AI, and increasingly GenerativeAI capabilities, sit at the center of a modern UCaaS offering, enabling everything from conversation and collaboration summaries to robust workflow automation that can drive efficiencies in work and eliminate mundane tasks. Increasingly, AI is being embedded across UCaaS environments, creating content and driving self-service knowledge engagements, aiding in tasks like automated scheduling or meeting summaries, to generating follow up communications to kick off new workflows and projects.

One key element of a UCaaS solution is the capacity to integrate communications and data across communications channels, specifically to improve performance and to enhance the quality and effectiveness of a customer’s experience. As greater emphasis is placed on effective and productive internal communications serving as a linchpin for more profitable and consistent delivery of positive customer experiences, expect to see a shift away from UCaaS as being thought of as solely an internal tool but also as one that unifies the entirety of the engagement ecosystem. For years, the UCaaS market has looked to integrate and align with its communications cousins in the contact center, namely Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). UCaaS market leaders have made steady inroads to a more comprehensive experience communications solutions that connects UCaaS and CCaaS in one vendor stack. However, 2024 marked a subtle shift as a CCaaS leader, NICE, looked to push from the opposite direction by introducing a low cost ($5/seat) UCaaS offering in 1CX. Expect to see more blurring of the CaaS lines as organizations, especially mid-market organizations, increasingly expect a single point of experience accountability.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Comprehensive communications offering across phone, chat, social messaging, and video
• Web, desktop, mobile, smart TV, and embedded hardware clients
• Call routing, forwarding, conferencing, and voicemail functions, now enhanced and optimized with generative AI tools
• Collaboration tools such as messaging, automated workflows, and project management
• Cloud deployed across public, private, and hybrid options for organizations with complex internal systems
• Enabling work-from-anywhere, especially for telephony-reliant functions such as service and support
• 24/7 support and training for technical and business users in all major geographies
• Key voice-to-text services, including global transcription in common languages of business
• Ready access to uptime detail across a network
• Flexible, scalable pricing
• Robust security protocols and measures, including adherence to key global regulations
• Integrations with business tools such as CRM and core customer service and support platforms and tools
• Reporting and metrics on performance, application utilization, traffic, incident logs, and uptime metrics
• AI and ML applications, such as smart routing and analysis of transcribed calls and engagements, to improve performance and experiences
• New generative AI applications being included range from automated post-meeting task scheduling, self-service scheduling and team-level schedule collaboration, talent network identification for team and talent building
• AI powered automation and workflows