Executive Summary

Digital Communications Platform

The necessity of enterprise communications internally and to external constituents like customers, partners and suppliers needs to be digital yet efficient and enabled across any channel and device. Dramatic technological changes have made it simpler and more cost-effective to enable these interactions in every business process across the workforce. Now, digital communications technology is more easily adopted globally, enabling supply chains to meet the demands of consumers through commerce.

Organizations invest in digital communication to increase the productivity of individuals and the workforce in the context of their roles and responsibilities. These systems enable seamless collaboration among workers to provide effective interactions and impactful communication experiences across the workforce and external constituents. And with the distributed workforces operating from retail locations to corporate offices to home locations, the ease of interactions across mobile devices to computers via chat or video is an essential part of what digital communications enable.

Digital communications is possible because of the technological evolution over the past two decades, including unified communications and collaborative computing software. With the advancement of cloud computing, these technologies have evolved into a platform and software as a service engagement and subscription model. The technology industry has positioned the requirements for a communication platform as a service operating with unified communication, supporting collaboration tools and embedded communication between parties.

In today’s organization, dozens of software providers and tools for digital communications operate across an enterprise with little to no integration to interoperate. This creates unnecessary costs and absorbs resources. Software and platforms that integrate into business applications can remedy the situation. However, consolidating providers requires business and IT leaders to navigate a course to assess and select the products that best meet the enterprise’s use cases and requirements. Through 2027, only one-quarter of enterprises will have standardized their digital communications technologies to provide the highest level of resilience and unification for an effective workforce.

The foundation of digital communications is a cloud-computing platform that supports all requirements through automation and workflows, with analytics and insights to support any interaction, whether audio, text or video. Users can choose any device and medium, including chat, collaboration or phone that operates across carriers and networks. More advanced enterprise requirements need communication platforms that embrace a portfolio of APIs and support the languages, protocols and routing to interoperate internally and externally. This includes authentication, WebRTC, programmable numbers, emergency calls, social messaging, mobile identity and notifications.

The administration of communications platforms and tools is critical for enabling proper software governance and management. The platform must support users, groups and organizations with policies and procedures to govern access to the technology and content. Archiving and storage plans should be managed through subscription and billing, coordinated by IT and procurement. The platform must support web and contact accessibility standards and comply with section 508, WCAG and European standards like EN 301 549.

The integration of communication platforms and basic and premium tools should support a range of applications, including contact centers, CRM marketing, sales, websites and customer experiences. IT and developers across the enterprise also require support for operating communication technologies through APIs and workflows. Direct integration for supporting audio and video should include computers, mobile devices, Apple and Microsoft technologies and even into automotive dash displays.

Communication systems should be simple for users to operate and deliver impactful experiences but also have the intelligence and workflows to interoperate across people and processes. Platforms and premium suites should maximize artificial intelligence and machine language to support intuitive interactions across text, video and voice. This requires integration with knowledge bases, accessed through conversations and workflows, using rules and prompts to support notifications.

Applying analytics for conversational insights can provide monitoring and intelligence on interactions. The broader use of analytics supports simple reporting, but analytics on speech and video are necessary to understand the usage and adoption of available tools. Monitoring also provides insights into quality, infrastructure, hardware and storage related to digital communications. The advanced use of generative AI like ChatGPT and large language models is becoming integrated into digital communications platforms.

Extended use of digital communications helps organizations to communicate externally through the management and production of webinars and training for workforce requirements. Webinars need the capability to send invitations, accept registration and record the session. Webinars also need the functionality to support interaction between participants and presenters. Typical webinar requirements include questions, spotlight, polling, handouts, surveys and notifications. Internal training requirements typically include registration, recording, playback, material review, multi-session courses, testing, catalog, payments and certification. Using digital communications for webinars and training is a recent advance, using readily available technologies instead of requiring separate skills and resources.

Premium suites offer the most sophisticated digital communications, where platforms and tools blend with advanced capabilities to deliver a unified approach. Use cases must interoperate with documents, electronic mail, messaging and tasks. Digital communications should integrate into business applications, accessible to a hybrid workforce and mobile devices. Systems must also interact with external parties.

The need to govern and manage digital communications requires administration and workflows across a variety of human and machine types, including conversational experiences that utilize AI/ML to increase sophistication.

Innovations in type interfaces include translations, text to speech and prioritization of notifications. Meeting functionality now supports avatars, consent, polling, panels and town halls. Digital communication providers should also have marketplaces that can augment existing deployments with more capabilities. And supporting phones is essential and should embrace the needs for conferencing, recordings and voicemails.

The Digital Communications platform is commonly referred to as communication platform as a service (CPaaS) though our framework is more comprehensive. The Buyers Guide evaluates the digital communications platform and and hould include embedded support for chat, analytics and insights, intelligence and workflow, communications administration and integration. The platform should additionally support the following: cloud platform, routing, programmable numbers, communication API, authentication and management API, and support for low code / no code support and with language and protocol, developer studio, encryption, and API support for WebRTC, emergency call, social messaging, mobile identity, notification and IoT.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of digital communication platforms as we define them: 8x8, Avaya, Bandwidth, Bird, Cisco, CM, Google, Infobip, IntelePeer, Microsoft, Plivo, RingCentral, Route Mobile, Sinch, Twilio, Vonage and Zoom.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirement in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Digital Communication Platform is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for digital communication platform software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for digital communication platforms to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of a digital communication platform technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential performance. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of digital communication platform software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating digital communication platform systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on their products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Twilio atop the list, followed by Infobip and RingCentral. Companies that place in the top three of overall, Product Experience, Customer Experience or a category earn the designation of Leader. Twilio has done so in 10 categories; Infobip in seven; Microsoft and RingCentral in four categories and Sinch in three categories and Vonage in two categories.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Infobip, Microsoft, RingCentral, Sinch, Twilio, Vonage and Zoom.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Cisco and Google.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Bird and CM.

Merit: The categorization and placement of software providers in Merit (lower left) represent those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer Experience or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: 8x8, Avaya, Bandwidth, IntelePeer, Plivo and Route Mobile.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle digital communication platforms, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they function that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on their requirements and use this research as a reference to their own evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of their products; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, a more robust evaluation can be conducted.

The research based on the methodology of expertise identified the weighting of Product Experience to 80% or four-fifths of the overall rating. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (15%), Capability (25%), Manageability (15%), Reliability (15%), and Usability (10%), This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Twilio, Infobip and RingCentral were designated Product Experience Leaders as a result of their top-ranked weighted performance. While not Leaders, Sinch, Zoom and Microsoft were found to meet a broad range of enterprise digital communication platform requirements, followed by Google, Vonage and Cisco.

Many enterprises will only evaluate capabilities for those in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of Reliability (15% weighting) and the need for platforms to perform and scale to meet a range of requirements for a digital communication platforms.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have Chief Customer Officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring the marketing of their commitment is made abundantly clear on website and in the buying process and customer journey.

Our Value Index methodology weights Customer Experience at 20% of the overall rating, or one-fifth, as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are TCO/ROI (10%) and Validation (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories and were deemed to be Leaders are Twilio, Microsoft and Sinch. These category leaders in Customer Experience best communicate their commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers such as RingCentral, Infobip and Zoom were not overall Leaders, but demonstrate a high level of commitment to the customer experience (CX).

Many software providers we evaluated did not have sufficient information available through their website and presentations. While many have customer case studies to promote their success, some lack depth in articulating their commitment to CX and an enterprise’s digital communication platform journey. This makes it difficult for enterprises to evaluate providers on the merits of their commitment to customer success. As the commitment to a software provider is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting CX in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Digital Communication Platform Buyers Guide for 2024, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support in at least two countries, and have at least 100 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.

The 2024 Digital Communications Buyers Guides will consist of three parallel evaluations that will result in the following: Digital Communications Overall, Digital Communications Platform, Digital Communications Basic Suite, and Digital Communications Premium Suite, and the overall assessment that includes both platform and premium suite research.

For inclusion in the Digital Communications Buyers Guide, a software provider’s primary source of revenue must be software-related. The actual or projected annual revenue must be at least $25 million in USD or equivalent for digital communication platform providers, also referred to as communication platform as a service (CPaaS), or at least $25 million for software providers of exclusively digital communications suites. The provider must operate across at least two countries and have at least 50 customers.

All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements are invited to participate in the Buyers Guide evaluation process, at no cost to them. If a provider does not respond to or declines the invitation, a determination is made whether to include it in our analysis based on our defined set of inclusion criteria. These criteria are designed to ensure we include in our evaluation providers’ geographic operations, customer base and revenue as well as all relevant aspects of the products fit for the particular category being evaluated. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product as reflected on its website that is within the scope of the Buyers Guide, it is automatically evaluated for inclusion. We have adopted this approach because we view it as our responsibility to assess all relevant providers whether or not they choose to actively participate.

To qualify for inclusion in the digital CPaaS evaluation, a software provider’s offering must include embedded support for chat, analytics and insights, intelligence and workflow, communications administration and integration and have additional platform support for the following:

• Cloud Platform – Required functionality.
• Routing – Required functionality.
• Programmable numbers – Required functionality.
• Communication API – Required functionality.
• Authentication and management API – Required functionality.
• Low code / no code.
• Language and protocol.
• Developer Studio.
  
• WebRTC API.
• Emergency Call API.
• Social Messaging API.
• Mobile identity.
• Notification API.
• IoT Thing API.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in the Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”