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Gartner's 2025 UCaaS Magic Quadrant: Key Trends

Source: uctoday.com

Published on September 29, 2025

Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS

According to Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant, the cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market continues its evolution, placing collaboration and AI at the forefront. The report assesses 11 providers, designating Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom as Leaders. Visionaries include 8x8, Dialpad, and GoTo, while Niche Players consist of Google, Sangoma, Vonage, and Wildix.

Adoption of UCaaS is being fueled by the need for streamlined management, improved collaboration, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to traditional on-premises UC systems, according to Gartner.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

Research-based strategic planning assumptions suggest a significant shift by 2028, with 90 percent of organizations depending on cloud office platforms for enterprise telephony, a substantial increase from 30 percent in 2025. Simultaneously, spending on conventional telephony platforms is expected to decrease by half.

Market Leaders

Cisco Webex: Continues to be a leader with its comprehensive portfolio encompassing telephony, messaging, collaboration, meetings, devices, and contact center solutions. Gartner emphasizes Cisco’s robust AI integration, featuring AI-driven audio enhancements, meeting summaries, gesture recognition, and immersive video capabilities. Although Cisco’s offerings are well-suited for large multinational organizations and regulated industries, some SMB clients may find lower-cost alternatives with simpler licensing more appealing.

Microsoft Teams: Remains a top UCaaS solution for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft provides lightweight telephony and voice-only call center features through Teams Premium and the Queues app. Gartner distinguishes Teams for its extensive geographic reach, particularly in regions with cloud challenges, as well as its increasing array of AI capabilities, including context gathering, meeting transcription, and predictive insights. Areas needing improvement include the absence of a fully integrated contact center and limited advanced telephony admin features.

RingCentral: Through its RingEX and RingCX offerings, RingCentral provides integrated telephony, messaging, meetings, and contact center functionality. Gartner notes strong adoption among organizations seeking feature-rich telephony and CCaaS-lite integration, along with a broad selection of third-party app integrations. Service and support navigation, as well as pricing complexity, present challenges, highlighting the need for clearer licensing and contract management.

Zoom: Increasingly positioning itself as a collaboration-focused UCaaS provider, Zoom combines meetings, messaging, telephony, and contact center capabilities. Its integrated AI features, such as automated intent discovery, message translation, and real-time agent guidance, boost productivity and workflow efficiency. Zoom has seen high adoption in highly regulated sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services, and has expanded into adjacent areas like Zoom Calendar, Docs, Mail, and workforce management, according to Gartner. While Zoom’s user experience is generally well-received, organizations primarily using Zoom for meetings may find its growing suite of functionalities complex.

Visionaries and Niche Players

Vendors like 8x8, Dialpad, and GoTo are still exploring AI-enabled telephony and contact center integration to stand out in a commoditized market. Gartner points out that these providers are investing in agentic AI capabilities, virtual assistants, and automated conversation summaries, though large-scale, multinational adoption remains limited.

Niche Players such as Google, Sangoma, Vonage, and Wildix primarily focus on SMBs or specific geographic areas. Integrated with Workspace, Google’s UCaaS offering benefits from AI features like real-time translation and meeting recaps but experiences slower innovation cycles. Vonage emphasizes its Fusion platform, which combines UCaaS, CCaaS, and AI to streamline operations for midmarket enterprises. Wildix and Sangoma are concentrating on customer-facing roles, lightweight CCaaS integration, and deployments focused on specific verticals, particularly healthcare, retail, and finance.

Key Trends in UCaaS

Gartner has identified several important trends shaping the UCaaS landscape:

  • Collaboration-Centric Adoption: Users are increasingly favoring meetings, messaging, and mobile-first tools over traditional telephony, as enterprise communication culture changes. UCaaS platforms are integrating seamless workflows to reduce app switching and increase productivity.
  • AI-Enhanced Workflows: Generative AI is the foundation for meeting transcription, translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis, while agentic AI automates administrative tasks and provides real-time coaching in contact center scenarios. AI adoption is currently having a greater impact on customer-facing roles, with wider enterprise adoption anticipated as the technology develops.
  • Telephony Footprint Rightsizing: Businesses are actively decreasing traditional telephony usage, eliminating redundant capabilities across UC platforms, and optimizing TCO. Although UCaaS telephony is still essential for certain user groups, innovation is increasingly focused on collaboration features rather than call management.
  • Integrated Contact Centre and CPaaS: Vendors are growing their portfolios to include CCaaS and CPaaS, often offering basic call center capabilities at little to no additional cost. These integrations support internal IT help desks, SMB contact centers, and CRM-enhanced workflows, bridging the gaps between core UCaaS and broader digital engagement needs.
  • Platform Convergence and Extensibility: UCaaS providers now offer extensive APIs, marketplaces, and integrations with business apps, enabling unified workflows and automated communications across CRM, ITSM, and workforce management systems. This trend highlights flexibility and modularity, especially for businesses seeking custom integrations.
  • Pricing and Licensing Awareness: Gartner emphasizes that buyers are increasingly assessing licensing transparency and entitlements when choosing a vendor. Pricing model complexity and frequent changes can affect adoption, renewal decisions, and overall customer satisfaction across the UCaaS space.

The UCaaS market is anticipated to continue consolidating around cloud-first, AI-enhanced collaboration platforms as traditional on-premises UC solutions are phased out. UCaaS is becoming the standard for large and very large organizations, while SMBs are increasingly looking for bundled, easy-to-deploy solutions. Gartner predicts that by 2028, specialized UC telephony licenses will decline significantly as organizations rely more on broader cloud office ecosystems.

In this dynamic environment, vendors such as Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom are using AI, integration, and collaboration-first strategies to lead the market, while Visionaries and Niche Players are exploring different approaches for targeted segments. As hybrid and remote work become permanent across industries, UCaaS platforms will be critical in enabling communication without interruption, improving productivity, and supporting digital transformation.