At last month’s NICE Interactions event in Las Vegas, the CCaaS stalwart launched a UCaaS platform: NICE 1CX.
The offering is a full-featured communication suite - with unlimited telco usage - at what NICE termed a "market-shattering" price of $5 per user per month.
Indeed, that's much lower than other platforms on the market. Consider Microsoft Teams. Its Essentials and Phone offering - with domestic calling - costs $16 per user per month when paid annually.
Yet, despite that difference, it's doubtful that lots of large enterprises will work with a conventional CCaaS player to spread UCaaS across their organization. Instead, they're more likely to opt for a more familiar offering, like Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
As such, it’s unlikely to be "market-shattering" in the enterprise.
However, this could resonate in the midmarket, especially with existing NICE customers, given its high brand loyalty and the platform's low price point.
Moreover, while enterprises still fall back on vendors like NICE, Genesys, and Five9 for CCaaS, midmarket customers are increasingly asking for a single-vendor solution in their RFPs.
The likes of RingCentral, Webex, and Zoom have built out their own CCaaS offerings to address that opportunity, which NICE hadn’t been able to do… until now.
A Challenge to UCaaS Vendors Stepping Into CCaaS?
Upon releasing 1CX, NICE argued it would be easier to disrupt the UCaaS space as a CCaaS vendor with price than vice versa.
Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, agreed. "For the most part, people will tell you that UCaaS has become a bit of a commodity, and a lot of the products look the same," he said in a LinkedIn video. "So, it’s hard to differentiate.
In CCaaS, that’s a very important product. That functionality deals with companies and customers. So, disrupting there and making that a commodity has become much less likely.
That said, Zoom has succeeded in slipping into the CCaaS space, seeing its midmarket and enterprise contact center deals spike by 246 percent year over year (YoY).
RingCentral has also enjoyed a promising start to its CCaaS journey, adding 100 contact center customers in Q1 with its RingCX platform.
However, both have sunk significant funds into their CCaaS innovation cycles, releasing 100+ features a quarter to deliver a worthy platform.
In the case of NICE, it has delivered a full comms suite in one release.
Of course, when solutions are low-cost, customers can dismiss them out of hand and question their quality.
However, NICE's move into the space is disruptive in the midmarket and could encourage other CCaaS vendors to innovate and respond.