Forrester: Tips for choosing a UCaaS provider

Licensing and add-ons

One of the most common approaches to licensing is a core UCaaS subscription to a standalone platform. This provides voice, video and messaging as a per-user subscription service. Many provide a phone number as either a base capability (included with all possible licences) or an upgraded tier.

While many standalone offerings require purchase of the same tier of licence for all employees, some offer mixed tiering, allowing customers to mix licence levels to best fit organisational needs – for example, purchasing the without-phone tier for knowledge workers and the phone tier for sales.

Standalone UCaaS is best for organisations that either have a supplier preference or do not have a UCaaS solution through a productivity app package. Providers with this market approach include 8×8 (with mixed licences), Dialpad, GoTo, Intermedia (with mixed licences), RingCentral, Sangoma, TelaVox, Vonage (with mixed licences), and Zoom.

Another option is when the core UCaaS is included with a productivity application. One of the most common – and easiest – approaches to purchasing UCaaS is through enterprise productivity app packages, and the only motion where customers may accidentally acquire a full UCaaS solution.

While they frequently require an add-on for phone licences, where specific communication capabilities are not needed – such as interactive voice response or international calling – this approach may not even require more investment than the productivity app licence.

These offerings frequently have the tightest productivity integrations. Providers with this market approach include Google, Microsoft and Zoho. Intermedia and Sangoma offer third-party productivity apps as an add-on package.

Another form of UCaaS licensing is where basic phone services are provided as an add-on. For many providers, a phone system licence is available as a per-user subscription service that also delivers a basic private branch exchange (PBX) for the organisation.

The base licence gives users a phone number that supports internal and domestic calling, with other call types incurring a charge. These can either require an add-on to an existing system or a licence for a standalone phone option.

PBX features include basic queuing and interactive voice response (IVR). More advanced phone features are in different purchase tiers. Providers that offer a phone add-on include Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Zoho and Zoom, all requiring licence add-ons or including-phone subscription tiers for phone systems.

For organisations needing phone only, Cisco, TelaVox, Vonage, Zoom and Zoho all offer standalone phone licensing (not requiring UCaaS or including standard UCaaS features).

Beyond basic phone services, UCaaS providers generally require an additional charge – either by consumption or as a subscription tier – to provide international calling (outside of the organisation) and toll-free lines.

Advanced PBX features – including lightweight contact centre as a service (CCaaS) with barge/monitor/whisper, call analytics and advanced interactive voice response – align to these tiers of phone systems. All providers offering a phone system maintain this approach.

Finally, there is the option to purchase meeting room connectivity. While all UCaaS providers can connect through mechanisms such as providing a physical link to a television, not all can embed into meeting room hardware. Frequently, more advanced functionality, such as audiovisual connected whiteboards and shared room phones, comes at a cost and requires a specialised add-on licence.

Some UCaaS providers might have an allocated number as part of the base enterprise agreement – support for 10 rooms, for example), but an additional per-room licence is necessary for large deployments connecting multiple rooms. Expect these room add-on charges from firms such as Dialpad, Microsoft (free for the first 20 rooms), RingCentral and Zoom.

Identify your buying business objective

When selecting the right licensing for your organisation, Forrester recommends those responsible for telecoms purchasing to establish a clear buying objective beyond available pricing and packages.

It can be aspirational, clearly defined and pragmatic, or some combination of these characteristics. While every objective and complicating factor will be unique to your organisation, these frequently fall into related buckets of buying scenarios. 

Among the most common buying scenarios and considerations is when you want an employee collaboration platform to connect to the organisation. For organisations looking to rapidly bring effective employee collaboration technology online, the best products will tightly couple with collaboration tools – and might even come with them. Technology providers meeting this need include Google, Microsoft and Zoho.

If you’re looking for standalone providers, Zoom might meet your needs with its massive integration marketplace. For organisations that prioritise messaging-first platforms, Rocket.Chat and Slack offer messaging apps with lightweight real-time meeting support.

You may be looking for a high-uptime phone system. For an organisation still relying on phone and requiring uptime guarantees, not all UCaaS or cloud-VoIP offerings will meet your needs – some providers only have uptime service-level agreements (SLAs) of 99.9%. While most UCaaS products have robust cloud PBX such as call queuing and hunt groups, uptime agreements become significantly more important when you lack direct control over the system.

For organisations requiring higher uptime, the main UCaaS providers offering higher levels of availability include 8×8, Cisco, Dialpad, GoTo, Microsoft, RingCentral and Vonage. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Intermedia, Ooma and Sangoma might meet their needs.

Another business driver is the need to modernise meetings. To improve the meeting experience of employees, organisations need to improve three areas: in-person experiences, connections with virtual attendees, and convergence of real-time and async experiences.

Critical capabilities of UCaaS suppliers offering meeting room technology are strong in-room device support and enhanced collaboration functionality such as artificial intelligence (AI) notes that bridge communication channels. UCaaS providers that offer organisations a way to modernise their meeting environments include Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Zoom.

Some people will want to focus on the need to improve customer connections through a combined unified comms and contact centre. For purchasers to streamline relationships, modernise their collaboration solutions, and even connect their contact centres to the rest of the organisation, suppliers increasingly offer joint UCaaS and CCaaS tooling.

For organisations looking to pursue these hybrid UCaaS/CCaaS offerings, suppliers include 8×8, Cisco, Dialpad, GoTo, Intermedia, RingCentral, Sangoma, TelaVox, Vonage, Zoho and Zoom.

There will also be organisations that want a platform to help them embrace AI. High on organisations’ priorities list for 2024 is adopting and getting value from AI developments.

While all UCaaS providers actively infuse their platforms with emerging tech and generative AI (GenAI), experimentation and innovation are ongoing. Companies such as Cisco, Dialpad, Google, Microsoft and Zoom already implement a variety of AI capabilities across their platforms, enhancing core meetings and communications experiences through capabilities such as automated note-taking and real-time translation.

Developments in AI will centre around unlocking communications as a data source, using video GenAI to further enhance experience, and even using natural language to accelerate management of the platforms.

Beyond the licensing decisions and your business objectives for UCaaS, Forrester urges those responsible for making telco buying decisions to consider their organisation’s size and scale, which complicates adoption.

The effort to implement and manage the tools offered by UCaaS providers, their geographic distribution, extensibility and even their strategic approach to the market should match your buying circumstances.

This article is based on Forrester’s “The Buyer’s Guide To UCaaS 2024”. Will McKeon-White is a senior analyst at Forrester. Forrester analysts Glenn O’Donnell, Paige Ludl and Kara Hartig also contributed.