UCaaSiS: UCaaS Is Stupid And Here’s WhyUCaaSiS: UCaaS Is Stupid And Here’s Why

UCaaSiS

Unified Communications as a Service is stupid. There, I said it and you should too. It doesn’t matter if you are a UCaaS proponent (like me), a happy UCaaS customer, or a UCaaS provider. It has never made sense and certainly doesn’t make sense now. The issue isn’t the technology; it’s the technologies, plural. Specifically, it’s the perceived bundle that needs to go.

Before we throw it all out, let’s review how we got here. UCaaS was derived from a breakthrough technology known as voice over IP (VoIP). Prior to VoIP, voice traffic was primarily transmitted over dedicated, synchronous networks. Packet-based networks were preferred for data, but voice and packet networks didn’t mix well. We cracked VoIP in the late 1990s; prior to then, every office and cubicle had separate voice and data connections.

VoIP enables voice and data to live together on data packet networks, including the Internet. The technology’s impact was much more than data and voice transport. For over 100 years, in addition to separate, dedicated networks, voice was severely constrained by distance. Circa 1990, most wired telephones in the world were connected to a central office or PBX telephone switch less than five miles away. VoIP eliminated this distance restriction.

Putting voice and data on the same network also unlocked a new world of capabilities such as unified messaging and the softphone. It allowed businesses to place phone extensions in employee homes, and move the PBX to off-site data centers. Some implementations became so large that they accommodated multiple businesses, and the Hosted PBX pay-as-you-go business model emerged.

Videoconferencing also relied on dedicated, synchronous networks and followed a similar trajectory, resulting in the ubiquitous video-enabled devices we enjoy today. Around the same time, businesses discovered the power of persistent chat, which rapidly evolved into team chat services. These three emerging cloud-delivered services – VoIP, videoconferencing and team chat -- consolidated into unified communications (UCaaS) in the first decade of the 2000s.

Cloud-delivered services offered several advantages over the more traditional premises-based status quo, such as evergreen software, inherent support for remote users, and some accounting benefits. It seemed logical to bundle all three emerging communications services. To those who believed UCaaS was the future, partial credit is due. UCaaS has certainly become popular, but the concept has always been aspirational.

In 2025, we must now admit that the concept of the UCaaS bundle is flawed. The three services -- voice telephony, team chat, and meetings -- are critical, but not particularly synergistic, especially since voice often remains independent of the bundle, and businesses tend to favor a best-of-breed approach regarding these services. Consider the following:

We know these services are often obtained separately, yet we generally consider UCaaS an assumed bundle. For example, Gartner no longer publishes Magic Quadrants on Corporate Telephony or Enterprise Meetings. Instead, it offers a single, global UCaaS report. Many other analyst firms report on UCaaS instead of the separate workloads.

UCaaS, as a single-provider solution, is a bad assumption. The default assumption should be that organizations will evaluate the workloads separately, as they already do, and select the providers that best meet their needs. The UCaaS bundles further complicate matters because of packaging inconsistencies. Some require phone service and some position phone service as an add-on. “UCaaS” literally mocks us as its services are rarely unified. Even worse, UCaaS makes things less unified because the bundles often introduce redundant apps.

Every organization should have excellent business telephony, effective team chat, and a comprehensive approach to online meetings. A layer of advanced AI services provides yet another factor (simplicity, UI/familiarity, reduced vendors, discounts, etc.) that favors a single-provider UCaaS stack. However, there are many compelling reasons for sourcing these applications separately: compliance, specific features/capabilities, vertical compatibilities, and switching costs, to name a few

Organizations should be encouraged to continue to evaluate each workload separately, not buy into the idea of a bundle with incomplete or not-best-of-breed features. Let’s call it as we see it. UCaaS is Stupid, or UCaaSiS, is my new motto.