Cataleya CEO looks over the past 12 months in the Unified Communications industry
The Voice and Collaboration landscape has seen a great deal of change in the past year, with macroeconomic conditions having a significant impact on the way businesses operate and communicate in a hybrid world.
Within the sector, the dominance of Microsoft Teams and Zoom continued, but other services have seen a spike in demand, as businesses try to make their money go further.
Overall, Voice and Collaboration are still important for businesses in today’s digital landscape, but trends and conditions will continue to evolve in the coming years.
In this post, Andreas Hipp, CEO of Cataleya, takes a look at some of the key trends that have emerged over the past 12 months.
“Recollecting my expectations for the year at the beginning of 2022, I was certainly fairly optimistic. The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be under control, and economies started growing again in late 2021 expecting a decent improvement in 2022.
“We had lots of interesting customer projects in the pipeline with a new potential partner in CEE, large projects in Bangladesh, and a few other operator proposals in the running, so all looked very promising.
“Despite seeing the tech boom reversing already in late 2021, it still looked like enterprise service provider businesses would find a better climate and larger market than pre-covid, and our chance to get a decent slice is fairly plausible.”
Emerging trends
That post-pandemic positivity that we all felt in 2021 may well have carried us through the year. However the war in Ukraine has had a significant impact on the tech industry, particularly in Voice and Collaboration communications.
The conflict has caused a sharp rise in inflation and cost of living increases, leading to recession panic and spending cuts that have weighed heavily on many businesses. According to Hipp this may lead to a scaling back of communications technology from some businesses.
“The Microsoft Teams and Zoom domination of the UC space continued, which has meant other alternative platform vendors have started to see their revenues decline. Although contact centre solutions are increasingly in demand, service providers are cautious on their capital spending as some might have overdone it during Covid when demand was booming.
“I could have predicted that Teams and Zoom would remain leaders in that segment, but some of the other trends we have seen have been unexpected, despite the inevitable news that growth has stabilised after the big increase in 2020 and early 2022.
“According to some market reports, the sector is going to grow at around 5% year on year for the next couple of years. I think that is a reasonable growth rate but since most of our growth comes from gaining additional market share, rather than just going with the flow, we see it as quite healthy at least for us.”
Overcoming Challenges
When it comes to Cataleya, Hipp said that he is proud of his team who have continued to grow the voice specialists in the face of tough economic conditions.
“This year has certainly been interesting and challenging, but nonetheless a lot has been achieved on the product side like our Link2Teams Beta product launch and WebRTC gateway for Orchid Link SBC.
“On the market side we were able to increase customer count significantly and revenue by about up to 20% over 2021. I think the achievement we are most proud of is the increase in our client base from 73 at the end of 2021 to almost 90 by the end of this year, which clearly shows that our value proposition works well and is appreciated by service providers willing to change vendors.”
