Eight Contact Center Platforms Racing to Answer Your Angry Call

There is a market worth roughly eight billion dollars this year that almost nobody chooses to buy and almost everybody ends up using. It hides behind the sentence "your call is important to us." It is contact center software, and right now eight companies are fighting over the two or three seconds between the moment you dial a support line and the moment something - or someone - picks up.

The eight in the ring here are Sharpen, UJET, Cisco, Voiso, Gladly, Enghouse Systems, Bright Pattern and Mitel. They range from a 1972 telecom giant to a Singapore startup that launched in 2018. They do not all sell the same thing in the same way, and their fortunes over the last two years have split so sharply that you can read the whole industry off their scoreboard. One raised fresh money. One left bankruptcy. One buys a rival every few months. And most of them have quietly reached the same conclusion: the fastest way to make you happy on a support call is to make sure a person never has to answer it.

Read those two facts next to each other and you have the story of customer service in 2026.

01 / The splitThe fault line is not features. It is who answers.

CCaaS - contact center as a service - is the cloud software that catches every customer interaction and decides what happens next. Voice, chat, SMS, email, social, all funneled through a routing and reporting layer that used to live in a rack in a basement and now lives in someone else's data center. For a decade the pitch was tidy: move your call center to the cloud, add channels, cut costs.

That pitch is over. The new fault line running through all eight vendors is AI voice agents - software that answers the call itself, holds a conversation, and resolves the routine stuff without a human in the loop. Some of these companies are leaning into it hard. Some are treating it as a feature to bolt on. And a couple are still busy fixing their balance sheets before they can worry about it at all.

Most of them have reached the same conclusion: the fastest way to make you happy on a support call is to make sure a person never has to answer it.

The useful way to sort the eight is by how they are betting. Here is the field as it stands, with each vendor's current momentum - up, holding, or under pressure.

02 / The climbersGladly, UJET and Cisco are pressing on the gas.

Gladly is the one selling a different idea of what a support call even is. Founded in 2014 by Joseph Ansanelli with Dirk Kessler and Michael Wolfe, it organizes support around the customer instead of the ticket - one lifelong conversation rather than a fresh case number every time you call. It leans hard into retail and direct-to-consumer brands, and in 2024 it raised $40M led by AXA Venture Partners while relaunching around AI. The framing it is pushing is worth stealing whatever business you are in: support is not a cost center to shrink, it is a place to make money. Its Sidekick automation, born from the 2023 acquisition of Thankful, is the engine for that argument.

UJET started with a grudge. Founder Anand Janefalkar had no contact center background - he built the company in 2015 because a support call went so badly it convinced him the entire model was broken. That outsider instinct turned into a cloud-native, mobile-first platform now organized around what UJET calls agentic experience orchestration. It has raised roughly $231M from Sapphire Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, GV, DCM and Citi Ventures, reaching $76M in its Series D in 2024. In 2025 it handed the CEO chair to Vasili Triant and moved Janefalkar to chairman and chief evangelist, the classic founder-to-visionary shuffle that signals a company trying to grow up without losing its origin story.

Cisco is the incumbent doing the hardest trick in enterprise software: turning a giant installed base into an AI story before the AI-native startups get there first. Webex Contact Center traces its cloud lineage to Cisco's $1.9B acquisition of BroadSoft in 2018. In 2024 it announced its Webex AI Agent, in 2025 it unveiled a deeper set of AI contact center tools and industry integrations, and it has an AI supervisor tool for quality management slated for early 2026. Cisco cannot move like a startup. It does not have to. It has the enterprise phone system already sitting in the building, and it is betting you would rather buy the AI from the vendor you already trust with the network.

03 / The operatorsEnghouse, Sharpen and Voiso play a quieter game.

Enghouse Systems is the least flashy company on this list and, arguably, the most instructive. Founded in 1984 in Markham, Ontario, and publicly traded in Toronto, its Enghouse Interactive division sells contact center software the boring, durable way - and the parent grows by buying things. In 2025 alone it folded in Aculab, Margento R&D and Trafi. Its Enghouse Interactive arm claims more than 10,000 customers across 100-plus countries, and fiscal 2025 revenue landed near CA$499M with no external debt. In a market drunk on AI announcements, growing steadily by acquisition and keeping the balance sheet clean is close to a radical act.

Sharpen is what a mid-market roll-up looks like in real time. It began as Fathom Voice, was founded by Cameron Weeks in Indianapolis around 2011, rebranded in 2016, and now sits inside private-equity firm Teleo Capital, which merged it with Plum Voice in 2023. It calls itself agent-first, but it has moved fast on AI voice agents, including a partnership with ElevenLabs, and in late 2025 it agreed to buy Ytel - its third acquisition in three years. Private equity plus a consolidating category tends to produce exactly this: buy, integrate, add AI, repeat.

Voiso is the dark horse. Founded in 2018 in Singapore by a group of telecom engineers - whose names, tellingly, it does not publish - it runs a global, AI-heavy stack aimed at high-volume outbound and support teams: predictive dialing with answering-machine detection, speech analytics, flow-built IVR and chatbots. It reports 300-plus staff across roughly six offices and six data centers on three continents, and it picked up a leader nod in G2's Fall 2025 mid-market speech analytics report for Asia. Its financials are mostly private, which is its own kind of statement.

04 / The survivorsBright Pattern is small. Mitel is rebuilding.

Bright Pattern should not, on paper, still be here. Founded in 2010 in San Bruno by contact center veterans including Konstantin Kishinsky, it has raised a rounding error compared with UJET or Gladly - low single-digit millions by most aggregator counts. Yet it keeps shipping omnichannel software with fast deployment and AI drawn from IBM, Google and Microsoft models, and it keeps showing up at GITEX and signing partners across the Gulf and Europe. It is a reminder that in enterprise software, distribution and focus can substitute for a war chest longer than investors expect.

Mitel is the cautionary tale and the comeback attempt in one company. Founded in 1972 by Terry Matthews and Michael Cowpland, it is a genuine telecom institution that grew through the ShoreTel and Unify acquisitions - and then buckled under the debt. In March 2025 it filed a prepackaged Chapter 11, cutting roughly $1.15B of debt and about $135M in annual interest, and it emerged that June under the ownership of its former lenders, ending Searchlight Capital's seven-year majority stake. It is now betting on hybrid communications, cloud plus on-premises, for the customers not ready to go fully cloud. The 53-year-old is not done. It just had to hand over the keys to keep going.

The 53-year-old is not done. It just had to hand over the keys to keep going.

05 / What a buyer should actually weighThe scoreboard is a shopping guide in disguise.

If you are the person who has to choose one of these, the AI demos will all look similar. The things that actually differ are underneath. Ownership tells you about roadmap stability: a PE roll-up like Sharpen and a fresh VC raise like Gladly point in different directions, and a company that just left bankruptcy will spend some attention on itself before it spends it on you. Vertical fit matters more than feature lists - Gladly is built for retail and DTC, Voiso for high-volume dialing, Cisco and Enghouse for large estates that value integration over novelty. And the real question hiding in every pitch is how the vendor handles the handoff: when the AI voice agent hits something it cannot solve, does the human it passes you to arrive with full context, or do you start over? That single moment is where customer experience is won or lost, and it is the thing worth testing before you sign anything.

The market will keep consolidating. The CCaaS pie is set to grow from about $8.3B in 2026 toward $30B by 2034, and the fastest-growing slice inside it is autonomous voice agents. That growth is the reason Enghouse keeps buying, the reason Cisco keeps shipping, the reason UJET and Gladly keep raising, and the reason Mitel had to reset. Eight companies, one phone call, and a shared bet that the next voice you hear on a support line might not be a voice at all.

06 / FAQQuestions people actually ask.

Reporting compiled from company sites and public filings, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Indianapolis Business Journal, SiliconANGLE, Cisco and UJET newsrooms, and CCaaS market forecasts. Momentum labels are editorial. Figures are approximate where sources vary.