UCaaS Market, Asia-Pacific, 2024-2030

AI-Powered Capabilities will Redefine UCaaS Value Propositions by 2030

This study provides an in-depth analysis of the APAC UCaaS market, including a forecast of installed users and average prices until 2030. The study discusses the state of UCaaS adoption and the growth potential across the five countries/sub-regions, including ASEAN, ANZ, China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Furthermore, this study provides market share and competitor analyses. Finally, the study identifies key growth opportunities for providers delivering hosted IP telephony, UCaaS, and other cloud services in APAC markets.

The region is marked by varying technology maturity and adoption of cloud-based services, more specifically for UCaaS, across the different countries and sub-regions. The global pandemic, which led to a tremendous increase in the usage of cloud collaboration solutions, also helped create pull-through for cloud private branch exchange (PBX) and UCaaS solutions. Businesses in many Asia-Pacific countries are rapidly moving towards cloud-based solutions to reduce IT infrastructure costs and improve agility. Australia & New Zealand (ANZ), South Korea, and Japan have led the region in UCaaS adoption, driven by advanced IT infrastructure and strong cloud awareness.

As businesses consider opting for a cloud PBX solution, Frost & Sullivan predicts that user growth will remain strong throughout the forecast period. Although not equally seen in all APAC countries/sub-regions, the need to address hybrid workstyles will also drive UCaaS growth. There exist considerable growth opportunities for service providers operating in the APAC markets. Hosted IP telephony and UCaaS providers can enhance their existing solutions with new features and capabilities, launch new offerings, expand into new customer segments or new sub-regions, develop more creative service bundles, or integrate their communications and collaboration solutions with third-party software and services to address new and unique use cases.

We expect ICT budgets in APAC to be split between on-premises UC deployments and UCaaS. While UCaaS helps boost business continuity, enables access to business communications from anywhere, and allows flexible capacity adjustments in uncertain times, on-premises UC will be preferred as security and provider origin are paramount to increasing APAC customers.

Increased AI adoption and the emergence of diverse AI use cases may have both positive and negative impacts on technology investments. AI-powered features may drive cloud communications and collaboration adoption. On the other hand, AI chatbots and virtual agents may reduce demand for contact center agent seats. All APAC markets will continue to grow in terms of both installed users and revenue. This study provides technology developers, service providers, resellers, and other market participants with important information to navigate the diverse APAC markets in the short term and identify key growth opportunities in the long term.

This analysis also includes revenues associated with Direct Routing, Operator Connect, or Teams Phone Mobile services for Microsoft Teams Phone users. Such services are not shown as third-party provider UCaaS seats as they are already counted as Microsoft UCaaS seats. However, his research service does not include cloud VoIP services that are primarily targeted at consumers and residential users- such as the consumer offerings from Google or Microsoft. Also, this research service does not include time division multiplexing (TDM) Centrex, Centrex IP, or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) access and SIP trunking services.