Unified-Communications-As-A-Service Platforms

Forrester's 2019 evaluation of this market named nine providers: 8x8, Cisco, Dialpad, Fuze, Microsoft, Mitel, RingCentral, Star2Star, and Vonage.

The two Leaders in the 2025 evaluation are Zoom and Google. Neither appeared in the 2019 list.

That is not a story about two companies improving. In 2019, neither was considered a UCaaS provider at all. Zoom sold video meetings. Google sold productivity software. The category was a telephony market, populated by companies whose heritage was the private branch exchange, and the question it answered was how to move your phone system to the cloud.

Six years later the winners came from outside telephony entirely, which tells you the question changed.

What UCaaS replaced

The private branch exchange was a piece of equipment in a room. It routed calls, held extensions, managed voicemail, and cost a capital budget line every seven years. Around it accumulated conferencing bridges, presence systems, and eventually instant messaging, each from a different vendor.

Unified communications was the argument that these should be one thing. Delivered as a service, that became UCaaS: voice, video, messaging, and presence from a single cloud provider on a subscription, with no equipment room.

The value proposition was straightforward and largely infrastructural. Fewer vendors, no capital cycle, remote workers reachable on their extension, and the ability to add a hundred seats without ordering hardware.

Forrester addressed its 2019 evaluation to application development and delivery professionals, which tells you where this sat organisationally. It was a systems purchase.

Notice also the rename. The 2019 report evaluated UCaaS Providers. The current one evaluates UCaaS Platforms. Provider is what you call a company that delivers a service. Platform is what you call something other things get built on.

Where the 2019 field went

Of the nine vendors in that evaluation, two are gone as independent companies. Fuze was acquired. Star2Star was absorbed into a larger communications group.

The rest persist, and several remain serious. But the notable thing is not attrition. It is that the category expanded to admit companies that were solving an adjacent problem, and those companies now lead it.

The mechanism was the pandemic, and the specific effect was that video meetings stopped being a feature of a communications system and became the primary venue for work. An organisation choosing a communications platform in 2019 was choosing how calls would be routed. An organisation choosing one in 2022 was choosing where its meetings would happen, which is a much larger decision with different criteria.

The telephony vendors had video. The video vendors had the thing everyone was actually using every day. That asymmetry decided the category.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Unified-Communications-As-A-Service Platforms, Q3 2025

Published on 14 July 2025, the evaluation scored twelve providers, described by Forrester as companies offering video, chat, and phone communications.

Zoom placed as a Leader with above-average customer feedback, taking the highest possible score in thirteen current offering criteria: meeting experience, chat intelligence, chat automation, collaboration organisation and unification, vertical and department features, meeting hardware support, hybrid support and resiliency, phone hardware support and services, contact centre, AI assistant, platform experience, security and data protection, and scale and geography. It also took top scores in vision, innovation, and supporting services within the strategy category.

Forrester credited its meetings experience, its work persistence, and its reliability, noting a well-integrated AI companion, flexible video layouts, tightly coupled document collaboration, no-code workflow automation accessible to employees, local backup extending beyond phone to video and messaging, and a credit-backed five nines uptime commitment for its phone system. Forrester's characterisation of its strategy is a refocus of collaboration on meaningful connection, with aggressive innovation to enable it.

Google placed as a Leader with the highest score of all providers in the strategy category and top possible scores in twelve criteria, with strengths in meeting experience, chat intelligence and automation, collaboration unification, native AI integration, and security and data protection. Forrester positioned it for midsize and enterprise organisations wanting a platform that blurs the divide between collaboration and communication.

8x8 placed as a Strong Performer, positioned around delivering UCaaS, contact centre, and communications platform capability through a single platform.

Work persistence

The most interesting phrase in Forrester's assessment of this market is one that has nothing to do with communications.

Work persistence describes what survives a conversation. A meeting is ephemeral by nature: people talk, decisions are made, and unless someone writes them down the output is a shared memory that diverges within a week. The historic function of communications software was to make the conversation happen. Work persistence is about making it produce something durable.

That is why document collaboration, AI notetaking connected to automation, and no-code workflow appear in a UCaaS evaluation at all. A platform that turns a meeting into a document, a set of actions, and a searchable record is doing something categorically different from one that connects the call reliably.

It also explains the competitive outcome. A company whose heritage is productivity software already thinks in terms of artefacts that persist. A company whose heritage is telephony thinks in terms of sessions that end. When the category's centre of gravity moved from the call to what the call produces, the productivity companies were structurally better positioned.

For a buyer this reframes the evaluation. The differentiating question is not call quality or feature parity, both of which converged years ago. It is what happens to the output of a conversation, and whether that output lands anywhere your organisation will find it again.

AI as inclusion rather than upsell

A specific commercial pattern is worth extracting from both Leader citations.

Google's strengths include native AI integration in its products at no additional cost. Zoom's positioning emphasises cost-effective AI, with its assistant available at no extra charge on eligible paid plans.

Both Leaders in this market are competing by including AI rather than by charging for it.

That is not the default across enterprise software. In several categories, AI arrived as a premium tier, a consumption meter, or a separate product line. Forrester's own assessment of the GRC market, for instance, found customers confused by AI pricing that ranged from free to consumption-based, with unclear value for money.

UCaaS went the other way, and the reason is structural. This is a per-seat market with high seat counts, low switching friction at renewal relative to a core business system, and two very large competitors who can absorb the cost of inference as a customer acquisition expense. In that configuration, charging separately for AI is a competitive disadvantage rather than a revenue opportunity.

The implication for a buyer is direct. If a vendor in this category proposes AI capability as a premium add-on, that is a pricing choice rather than a technical necessity, and it is negotiable in a way it might not be elsewhere.

Where it meets the contact centre

The boundary with contact-centre-as-a-service is the other structural question in this market, and the two categories keep reaching into each other.

Contact centre appearing as a scored criterion in a UCaaS evaluation, with Zoom taking a top score in it, is the visible edge of that. So is 8x8's positioning around delivering unified communications and contact centre through a single platform.

The argument for buying both from one vendor is real. An agent escalating to a subject matter expert elsewhere in the business is crossing that boundary constantly, and when the two systems are separate the escalation involves a transfer that loses context. One platform means presence, directory, and routing work across both populations.

The argument against is depth. Contact centre operations have requirements, workforce management, quality management, real-time analytics, that a communications platform bolts on rather than specialises in, and organisations running large contact centres generally find the specialists better.

The practical answer usually depends on contact centre size relative to the whole organisation. A hundred agents inside a ten thousand person company is a strong case for one platform. A thousand agents in a two thousand person company is a contact centre business with an office attached, and it should buy accordingly.

What the category is actually about now

Set the two vendor lists side by side and the conclusion is unavoidable. This stopped being a communications market.

The 2019 field competed on things a telephony buyer cares about: reliability, call features, hardware support, geographic coverage, cost per seat. Those criteria still appear, and Zoom taking a top score on phone hardware support and a five nines commitment shows they still matter.

But the criteria that separated the Leaders in 2025 are chat intelligence, chat automation, collaboration unification, AI assistants, and workflow. Those are collaboration criteria. They describe a system for getting work done, in which voice happens to be one channel.

Which puts the category in an odd position relative to its own name. Unified communications describes the problem of 2010, when voice, video, and messaging were separate systems from separate vendors. That problem is solved. The current problem is that work happens across meetings, chats, documents, and tasks, and the artefacts scatter.

The vendors leading this market are selling a solution to the second problem while being evaluated in a category named after the first. That gap will not persist, and the next rename in this lineage will probably be the one that admits it.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.