Demand for unified communication solutions has significantly increased with users' rising reliance on remote communication in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The solutions can help enhance enterprises' internal communication and improve their efficiency of communication and cooperation with clients. Digitimes Research believes remote communication will become a new normal during the post-pandemic era and will accelerate the expansion of the unified communication industry sector.

A unified communication solution integrates various messages coming from sources such as traditional telecom systems, Internet and PC computing into one same format, and transmits messages via a single user interface for employees of an enterprise and its clients to improve their efficiency of communication and cooperation.

With the rise of cloud computing systems, unified communication solutions have also been transformed to become unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and can be extended into two different cloud service solutions: contact center as a service (CCaaS) and communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

UCaaS is a type of software as service (SaaS) that primarily focuses on communication and cooperation. Enterprises will be able to activate such a service via registration and a few steps of setup. Microsoft's Teams and Zoom as well as Slack are all UCaaS-type of services.

CCaaS is a customer service contact center solution, allowing enterprises to use methods such as texts, social medial and voice to maintain their connections with clients. Many enterprises have also adopted AI technology to further improve their customer experience.

CPaaS is also able to digitalize all telecom services, transforming them into application programming interface (API) format and putting them into the cloud platform. Via the transformation, enterprises will be able to embed services provided by telecom operators into their own-brand products to satisfy clients' customization needs.

Voice-based social media platform Clubhouse is mainly using CPaaS technologies to offer its services.