Why Hasn’t UCaaS Exploded for Public Cloud Vendors?
Why Hasn’t UCaaS Exploded for Public Cloud Vendors? by Joseph Williams
The promise of UC as a Service (UCaaS) has loomed large for service providers that believe that the traditional PBX is a dinosaur, that a VoIP service is too limited, and that enterprise UC is better delivered off-premise. Among others, Microsoft’s Lync and Cisco’s HUCS (now HCS) platforms both splashed on the scene with a lot of fanfare and with high expectations.
Fair to say the results to date for UCaaS have been modest. Much of the cited growth in UCaaS comes from counting cloud-based point communication solutions (video, conferencing, voice). These may be aggregated on a price list but usually are not technically integrated with each other and rarely are truly unified in any meaningful way by identity, presence, and with other productivity applications.
So why hasn’t UCaaS exploded yet for Public Cloud Vendors?
One of the major obstacles has been the lack of a robust multi-tenant UCaaS environment for service providers to sell. Solutions are either a stripped-down version of the enterprise version (e.g., Lync) or multi-instance rather than multi-tenant (e.g., HCS). UCaaS is hard to sell with a less compelling offer compared to the premise-based version and hard to build a business around if running it requires increased operational overhead for the service provider.
Another obstacle for the service provider has been a lack of credible demand generation from their vendors for their UCaaS solutions. Although all vendors do what they can do to drive demand for their products, rarely are they leading their own enterprise customers to partner service provider solutions. Channel incentives from vendors typically flow more readily to on-premise sales or to sales that lead to the vendors’ own cloud solutions.
The UCaaS providers create their own obstacles. For those that come from a traditional voice or video background they commonly have not learned how to upsell all the value of a UC suite and still sell like UC is just enhanced voice or video. And for those that are traditional cloud vendors they try to apply the same selling techniques they used to sell web hosting or email and they are discovering that their sales models do not work for UCaaS.
The sales process for UCaaS is measured in months, not weeks, and in many cases is bound to a customer’s lifecycle for their existing PBX solution. Service providers getting into the UCaaS market have struggled to adjust their sales processes and incentives and the UCaaS vendors supporting them have not done a stellar job of coaching their partners on how to acquire customers. And UCaaS service providers often underestimate the demands that “service” will place on them to keep a 7x24 critical system up and running.
Even when all the pieces for UCaaS come together for a sale, the onboarding process is often difficult, time-consuming and expensive for the service providers.
Toss in issues with legacy handsets, mobile devices, regulatory requirements, and ill-defined enterprise requirements for UC (let alone for the cloud) and it really is not a surprise that UCaaS has not exploded yet. The promise is there but reality is still years away unless the UCaaS vendors make some dramatic investments in their products and in their channel.