Executive Summary
Understanding the Segments and Knowing the Players
CaaS is emerging as an answer to the pain organizations experience trying to keep up with rapid changes in both technology and capability in the unified communications and collaboration space. Virtualization, centralization and robust cloud services, along with a need to streamline and optimize operations, are causing organizations worldwide to seriously consider communications as a service. Organizations adopting these services are experiencing benefits which may include Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantage, built-in business continuity, geo-redundant disaster recovery capabilities, lower risk of infrastructure obsolescence and the opportunity to refocus highly talented IT resources on strategic business initiatives.
In Part 2 of this report, we provide an estimate of the size of the cloud-based communications market and describe service provider approaches to this market. We articulate differences between “true cloud”, hosted, dedicated and virtualized solutions, list known vendors by geographical markets and conclude with actionable recommendations for organizations considering unified communications as a service.