If you ask an internet telephony operator what the main challenges facing its business development in 2020 are, you're likely to hear some of the following answers:

• The size of the marketing budgets that major operators devote to promoting their offers
• Increase in customer churn rate
• Be considered as a default supplier rather than a value-added service provider

These answers are perfectly valid today, and confirm the trends observed over the last few years. However, they are nothing compared to another form of danger that many operators are becoming aware of.

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The main threat to VoIP operators in 2020 comes from a new form of competition. Collaboration solution providers (Zoom, Microsoft, Google...) are now well established in the enterprise, and their penetration rate has risen even further as a result of the current health crisis. Their services have rapidly become an integral part of corporate processes and workflows. A service that a local VoIP operator does not usually offer. And these providers have realized that they are missing out on their customers' telephony budgets...

Today, collaboration solution providers are beginning to realize that their subscriber numbers are plateauing. So it's only natural that they're looking for another growth vector by targeting a new source of revenue: voice hosting. Zoom, Microsoft and Google, the "big players" in 2020, all offer hosted voice services and have launched aggressive sales and marketing campaigns to convert their customers to an all-in-one solution. The effect is to displace the hosted PBX as well as the VoIP operator...

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Many VoIP operators have not included collaboration solutions in their catalogs, and up until now have seen no problem with their customers ordering Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other licenses directly. For many of them, this type of offering was not deemed necessary to maintain their competitiveness or help them win voice markets. Some even considered that this type of solution would be long and tedious to implement, and would produce insufficient margin. This doesn't seem to be the case, however, when we look at current tariffs, especially since basic licenses do not include a telephony service.

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The VoIP ecosystem, from local operators to wholesalers with extensive partner networks, is finding that their customers are increasingly turning to Microsoft, Google and Zoom, to name but a few. Today, companies see the value that collaboration and videoconferencing solutions can bring them. Some of them are now considering entrusting their telephony budget to a full-service provider. And if that supplier is one of the leaders, that can only make their decision easier.

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This is not a passing trend, and the pressure on VoIP operators will only increase as competition between the major collaboration solution providers develops. VoIP operators need to act now to identify this new threat, and make the necessary adjustments to their catalogs to retain their customers.

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