Gartner defines communications platform as a service (CPaaS) as a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to embed a range of communications capabilities into applications over channels such as voice, SMS, email, messaging apps, and video. They also provide conversational capabilities, security, authentication, and automation. CPaaS delivers omnichannel, programmable experiences to enhance digital customer engagement. In 2026 and beyond, CPaaS aims to offer deeper capabilities, such as customer journey analytics, automation, personalization, and omnichannel engagement driven by AI and 5G. The purpose of CPaaS is to enable enterprises to enhance their communication workflows by providing simplified access to multiple communication capabilities without requiring the complex architectures typically needed to leverage these channels. CPaaS enables enterprises to shorten the time to market for new products and services, personalize communications, and orchestrate customer journeys across multiple channels. It delivers digital engagement and operationalizes customer experience, while also driving business efficiencies at scale with digital service delivery. It is modular/composable in design and can expand from initial single use cases to many others as additional business units learn of its value.
Gartner defines the Contact Center Infrastructure market as equipment, software and services that enable organizations to manage multichannel self-service and assisted service customer interactions holistically from a customer experience and an employee engagement perspective. CCI solutions are dedicated to supporting a single customer enterprise or tenant on each instance of the system, even if that customer or tenant supports multiple contact center operations on that dedicated instance. CCI solutions can be deployed on the customer’s premises or can be hosted and managed in a third-party data center or private cloud.
Workforce engagement management (WEM) software is a collection of technologies that help manage the customer service workforce to ensure a high level of operational performance while elevating employee well-being, discretionary effort and satisfaction. The core capabilities of WEM products include: • Evaluation and improvement • Time management • Metrics and recognition (that is, performance management) • Assistance and task management • Voice of the employee (VoE) feedback • Recruitment and onboarding
The corporate telephony market is evolving from a focus on innovation in proprietary hardware to use of commodity hardware and standards-based software. While most telephony solutions are Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled or IP-PBX solutions, the associated endpoints are a mix of time division multiplexing (TDM) and IP. Corporate telephony platforms focus on high-availability, scalable solutions, which support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), desktop and soft phone functionality, and the ability to integrate with enterprise IT applications while delivering toll-grade voice quality.
Enterprise Networking and Communications refers to the products and services that enable secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity and communication across distributed enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on core and edge networking, unified communications, private and public mobile networks, and managed network services—supporting digital transformation, and operational efficiency.
Gartner defines meeting solutions as real-time communication services with their associated devices that support live interactions between participants for internal and external collaboration, presentations, learning, training sessions, webinars and town halls. Meeting solutions power diverse use cases, such as one-on-one meetings, remote sales engagements, board meetings, telehealth sessions, remote banking and consulting services, to name just a few. Meeting solutions enable rich information sharing and interaction by combining audio and video, in-meeting chat, content and screen sharing, and visual collaboration and whiteboarding.
Gartner defines unified communications as a service (UCaaS) as a multitenant, subscription-based service that is cloud-delivered. It provides business telephony features; public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity that enables inbound and/or outbound external calling; and collaboration features, such as messaging and meetings. UCaaS services can be consumed by end users with traditional handsets, desktop clients, web clients, meeting room systems and mobile apps. UCaaS is used by organizations to securely communicate and collaborate — both internally and externally. It includes telephony, messaging and meetings. UCaaS providers may offer variations of each of the three core modes of communication and also offer a range of cloud contact center functionalities, either self-developed or through integration/partnerships with cloud contact center specialists. Gartner’s definition of meetings for the UCaaS market mostly focuses on the capabilities for internal collaboration, work from home and external presentation meeting use cases. Other specialized use cases — such as webinar, remote support, distance learning and training — are often available from UCaaS offerings, but are not mandatory for inclusion in this research. These use cases are part of a separate market defined by Gartner (the meeting solutions market).
The workstream collaboration (WSC) market consists of products that deliver a conversational workspace based on a persistent group chat. Products in this market are primarily used to organize, coordinate, and execute outcome-driven teamwork such as that associated with the project- or process-related activities. Secondary uses can include ad hoc collaboration and community discussions.