Enterprise SBC (eSBC): Network element that controls and manages real-time multimedia traffic flows between IP networks, handling signaling and media

What We Count

In this service, we count vendor’s and provider’s relative revenue in US$ recognized during the calendar year for every category. We do not include revenue from management systems, service, or support within individual product categories.

SBC sessions: number of simultaneous bi-directional media flows controlled via software licenses (not including oversubscription)

Regions

Metrigy releases Workplace Collaboration 2025 & 4Q25 Market Shares

April 28, 2026 – Metrigy has published its Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 2025 and 4Q25 market shares and updated forecasts. The categories include enterprise session border controllers (eSBCs), IP desk phones, on-premises PBX, SIP trunking, and UC as a service (UCaaS). Highlights include:

“Voice and collaboration tools remain important to businesses and with over half of users now on a UCaaS platform, overall revenue growth for the market has slowed. UCaaS is now a commodity market with little differentiation on core service capabilities. There are still a number of smaller providers but the Big 4—Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom, RingCentral—comprise 53% of the total market,” says Diane Myers, Metrigy senior research director.

MetriCast forecasts and market shares are a core part of Metrigy’s MetriCast Service, which also includes detailed end-user adoption studies; MetriRank vendor ratings across select categories; and the annual MetriStar Awards for vendors earning top customer sentiment ratings and whose customers achieve top business success. For more information, visit http://www.metrigy.com/metricast/. 

What’s the state of adoption for key worksplace collaboration products and services? In this episode, Diane Myers, senior research director and principal analyst responsible for Metrigy’s market forecasting and vendor rankings, shares top learnings from our 2024 global buyer-side research study. Technologies covered: UCaaS, meetings, conferencing cameras, IP desk phones

While Microsoft has not publicly released a statement, by all accounts the company has blown up its Azure for Operators business.

Word of the implosion started with news reports that Microsoft let go of a large number of employees attached to Azure for Operators—these employees being from the acquisitions of Metaswitch and Affirmed Networks, both of which make up a large portion of Azure for Operators. As I’ve learned in discussions with multiple sources, it does appear that these reports are true, that the worst-case scenario of employee layoffs, as well as products’ end of life (EOL), has indeed occurred. We would expect a skeleton product support team is in place for the remainder of contract terms for the majority of clients.

For years, I was one of the sole industry analysts to cover service providers’ voice-over-IP and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) infrastructure. When Microsoft acquired Metaswitch in 2020, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Being in the operator infrastructure market, especially selling core Class 5 switch replacement solutions, is very different from selling cloud capacity or enterprise services. I was vocal about this same sort of scenario when Mitel acquired Mavenir in 2015—a decision that took only two years to break apart.

As someone who covered Metaswitch extensively for 13 years, I know service provider customers loved the company. Metaswitch’s core portfolio included Class 4/5 softswitches, gateways, application servers for consumers and businesses, and session border controllers (SBCs). It had some IMS, but the business was relatively small and not a fit with their large base of tier 2/3 wireline telcos in North America.

Metaswitch had success in penetrating tier one providers worldwide with SBCs in particular, with expansion across Europe, parts of Asia and Latin America. As network elements such as SBCs and IMS core became increasingly software-based, putting these elements in the cloud made sense. Microsoft likely envisioned a wave of opportunity, and grew its operator business through acqusitions. However, the reality is that many operators were never going to put large pieces of core switching infrastructure into public cloud environments, and that wave of opportunity never materialized.

Where does this leave Metaswitch customers?

News of unhappy Metaswitch customers is widespread, and the reverberations will be felt for years to come. It would have made sense for Microsoft to sell the business, not to recoup costs but to put its customers into steady hands. It’s possible that this may still be a way out for Microsoft, but in the absence of that, operators have a few choices.

There are a handful of stories in the unified communication and collaboration space that stand out in 2022, with Microsoft Teams’ expanded calling capabilities being front and center. It’s a story that starts in 2021 and picked up momentum in mid-2022.

Microsoft Teams has become a leader in the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market but success with voice has never been at its core compared to most other providers. However, the demand for Microsoft Teams calling is high. The launch of Microsoft Operator Connect towards the end of 2021promised easier implementation of calling with Microsoft Teams. The cost and complexity of Microsoft Teams direct routing solution had previously put PSTN calling out of reach for many businesses, so Operator Connect had the potential to give Microsoft Teams users an easier path to PSTN-enabled voice connections.

The reality ended up being much harder than promised with Operator Connect and its SIP trunking partners. By summer 2022, Microsoft had launched the Operator Connect Accelerator Program, providing network operators with a turnkey solution to bring calling services to Microsoft Teams. The Accelerator program provides a suite of capabilities, including managed SBC as a service, API bridging to the Operator Connect APIs, integration into OSS/BSS platforms, and network as a service into the Microsoft Teams cloud. Vendors benefiting from the program include Audiocodes, NuWave, Ribbon, Sippio and Microsoft’s own Azure for Operators (formerly Metaswitch). And then there a number of UCaaS providers including RingCentral, 8×8, and Vonage that are taking advantage of the challenges around Microsoft Teams calling by aggressively marketing their own direct routing services coupled with their voice solutions.

Another story that shaped the UCaaS landscape this past year: While operators continue to be successful with voice trunking, they continue to see demand for UCaaS services but many are choosing not to manage and maintain their own platforms. Instead, there are more operators opting for partnerships. Notably, Lumen partnered with Alianza for its own branded UCaaS service, Lumen Cloud Communications, in April.

Read the rest of this post on NoJitter.com

A Live Conversation with Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst at Metrigy, on Using Teams and Zoom as Your Business Phone Systems

Multi-site and multi-national organizations are increasingly turning to Microsoft Teams and Zoom Phone for their calling/telephony services, extending the value of their collaboration tools to better support distributed and hybrid employees. Making the move to the cloud can present challenges, especially for larger, distributed organizations

Join us on October 4 at 11 AM ET as we delve into some of the considerations you should take prior to and during a migration. We’ll offer potential options and solutions to common issues.

Conversation topics:

Migrating to Cloud Calling via Teams and Zoom

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Greg Zweig, Director of Solutions Marketing, Ribbon
Date: October 4, 2022
Time: 11:00 am ET

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Don’t compromise security, performance when moving to Teams, Zoom, and others

Business technology leaders are re-evaluating their communications and collaboration portfolios as they plan for the future workplace. The shift to permanent full-time or hybrid work-from-home has served as a catalyst for more cloud-based UC and CX services, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, and a host of contact center providers.

But there are some important issues to address when moving to the cloud. For example, how do you transfer complex call routing policies? What about existing telecom contracts that expire at different times? And is it feasible to flash-cut from large on-premises deployments—which addresses security, dial-plan management, and survivability needs—to cloud services?

Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) addresses these key issues by allowing companies to transition to the cloud immediately or over time, using their same telecom provider.

Join Metrigy CEO and Principal Analyst, Robin Gareiss, and Oracle Director of Product Marketing, Doug Tait, for a lively discussion of how BYOC addresses potential roadblocks for cloud transitions. During this webinar, you will learn:

Mitigate Security Risk as You Migrate to Cloud Services with BYOC

Presented by: Robin Gareiss, CEO & Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Doug Tait, Director of Product Marketing, Oracle
Date: June 2, 2021
Time: 10:00 am ET

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