Before I begin; I have great respect for Pamela Clark-Dickson, we’ve known each other for well over a decade, she knows the programmable communications industry better than any other analyst I know. The report “Omdia Universe: CPaaS Platform Providers, 2022–23” is simply doing what the customer wants, marketing collateral. She’s doing her job. But the report is wrong.

(UPDATE: I talked with Pamela last night (she’s based in Australia) and it turns out Vonage did not commission this specific report, rather has been heavily promoting it. I changed this article to better reflect the situation. I consider this report to be biased towards marketing collateral given the issues identified.)

Why is Vonage promoting this report? To help justify the acquisition by Ericsson. I reviewed the acquisition here https://alanquayle.com/2021/11/cxtech-week-47-2021/. Investors forced action.

I recommend reviewing this simple programmable communications model, https://alanquayle.com/2021/02/programmable-communications-model/. It will help you understand better the structure of the programmable communications industry.

Syniverse (aggregator) is a supplier to Twilio (applications of which CPaaS is one), they are not CPaaS competitors, the overlap is slight. Twilio recently invested $750M in Syniverse, they wouldn’t do that if they were direct CPaaS competitors, https://alanquayle.com/2022/05/cxtech-week-20-2022/.

Here are just a few other points:

• Telnyx is missing because at least one CPaaS competitor in the chart resells them. Many aggregators and CPaaS are missing but I understand the line has to be drawn somewhere. I just highlight Telnyx as a gap given others are included that resell them.
• RingCentral is a “CPaaS” for many of its enterprise customers, like 8×8. This issue needs to be resolved in any CPaaS landscape as it’s the customers’ spend that define the market. The Forbes “What is CPasS” report also made this error, reported in CXTech Week 18 2022.
• Twilio is ‘99% of a CCaaS’, has a massive SIP trunking business, email marketing, customer data analysis, etc. calling it a CPaaS misses the breadth of its programmable communications offer.
• The Twilio APIs are easier to use than the Vonage APIs, just ask people working with them. But that really doesn’t matter, nor do all the developer registrations, note developers use multiple emails to get more free stuff. Production is a different issue.
• In Asia Vonage is more like an SMS aggregator (Sinch and TeleSign are competitors, Nexmo history), in Europe Vonage is more like a CPaaS/UCaaS/CCaaS (Twilio and RingCentral are competitors, mix of Nexmo and Vonage history), and in North America a telco (Verizon and AT&T are competitors, Vonage history).

The report in my opinion is more marketing collateral for some of the companies identified. They did not commission this report from what I’ve been told, but it will undoubtedly curry favor with those accounts.