Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1H1RO36&ct=130710&st=sb Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 31 July 2013 ID:G00251797 Analyst(s): Bern Elliot, Steve Blood VIEW SUMMARY EVALUATION CRITERIA DEFINITIONS The enterprise UC market continued to mature over the past 12 months and is now considered by Gartner to be entering the early mainstream adoption phase. Products and best practices both for Ability to Execute deployment and increasing end-user adoption will continue to mature during the next several years. Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in Market Definition/Description the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria. Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of The primary goal of unified communications (UC) is to improve user productivity and to enhance the overall organization's financial health, the financial business processes. Gartner defines UC products (equipment, software and services) as those that and practical success of the business unit, and the facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to obtain that goal. This can include likelihood that the individual business unit will continue the control, management and integration of these methods. UC products integrate communications investing in the product, will continue offering the channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products. consumer applications and devices. Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in UC offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and perform. The UC products may be composed of a single vendor (stand-alone) suite, or customers may negotiation, presales support, and the overall deploy a portfolio of integrated applications and platforms spanning multiple vendors. In many cases, effectiveness of the sales channel. UC is deployed to extend and add functionality to established communications investments. Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive UC products are used by people to facilitate personal communications and by enterprises to support success as opportunities develop, competitors act, workgroup and collaborative communications and business workflows. Some UC products may extend customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. 1 of 26 02/09/2013 23:50 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1H1RO36&ct=130710&st=sb UC outside company boundaries to enhance communications among organizations, support interactions This criterion also considers the vendor's history of among large public communities or for personal communications. UC applications are increasingly being responsiveness. integrated or offered in concert with collaboration applications to form unified communications and Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity collaboration (UCC) and, in some cases, are being integrated with business applications and workflows, and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the something Gartner calls communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs). organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification It is useful to divide UC into six broad communications product areas: with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a Voice and telephony — This area includes fixed, mobile and soft telephony, as well as the combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, evolution of PBXs and IP PBXs. This category includes options for voice and video that bypass thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities. traditional connectivity methods, such as direct Internet-based connections. Customer Experience: Relationships, products and Conferencing — This area includes voice (audio) conferencing, videoconferencing, Web services/programs that enable clients to be successful conferencing that includes document and application sharing capabilities, and various forms of with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or unified conferencing capabilities. account support. This can also include ancillary tools, Messaging — This area includes email, which has become an indispensable business tool, voice customer support programs (and the quality thereof), mail and various approaches to unified messaging (UM). availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on. Presence and IM — These will play an increasingly central role in the next generation of communications. Presence services, in particular, are expanding to enable the aggregation and Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of publication of presence and location information between (from and to) multiple sources. This the organizational structure, including skills, enhanced functionality is sometimes called rich presence. experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles Clients — Unified clients enable access to multiple communications functions from a consistent that enable the organization to operate effectively and interface. These may have different forms, including thick desktop clients, thin browser clients and efficiently on an ongoing basis. clients for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, as well as specialized clients Completeness of Vision embedded within business applications. Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate Communications-enabled applications — This broad group of applications has directly integrated those into products and services. Vendors that show communications functionality. Key application areas include collaboration applications, contact the highest degree of vision listen to and understand center applications, notification applications, and consolidated administration, reporting and/or buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance analytics tools. Eventually, other applications that support business processes will be those with their added vision. communications-enabled; these might include integrating UC with hospital applications to improve Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of doctor-nurse transaction processing workflows or to improve doctor-doctor collaboration activities, messages consistently communicated throughout the or adding communications to purchasing/order processing applications to improve the accuracy organization and externalized through the website, and speed of those processes. When business applications are integrated with communications advertising, customer programs and positioning statements. applications to improve operations, Gartner calls them CEBPs. Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect The stakes for vendors in the enterprise UC market are exceedingly high and, in some cases, sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates existential. The stakes for enterprise decision makers are also high due to the significant costs, visibility that extend the scope and depth of market reach, and business impacts of their choice. Five UC characteristics will have an important effect on the skills, expertise, technologies, services and the success of a UC product and the satisfaction of users: customer base. Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach 2 of 26 02/09/2013 23:50 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1H1RO36&ct=130710&st=sb User experience (UX) — The quality and effectiveness of the overall user experience (UX) across to product development and delivery that emphasizes all devices will heavily influence the effectiveness of the solution, its adoption rate and, ultimately, differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature enterprise productivity. While consolidated administration and management are important sets as they map to current and future requirements. characteristics of a successful solution, it is the high-quality end-user experience that will drive Business Model: The soundness and logic of the adoption and productivity. vendor's underlying business proposition. Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy Mobility — User expectations of how UC solutions leverage mobility continue to escalate. In to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the addition to demanding full UC functionality on mobile devices, users are starting to expect mobile specific needs of individual market segments, including devices to be integrated with desktop devices to allow for a more powerful work environment and vertical markets. to integrate UC with mobile consumer applications. In this year's Magic Quadrant evaluation, we Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and again place extra weight on mobility as it remains a key differentiator and requirement. synergistic layouts of resources,