Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2010

The seventh annual Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UCMQ) was published on July 28, 2010, continuing this exciting story of disruptive evolution (almost a revolution) in the communications industry. 

Some key points, from my perspective:

• Microsoft, Cisco and Avaya (in that order) are the only three in the Leaders quadrant, down from six vendors last year. Microsoft is the clear leader, with the highest ranking of any supplier on both the “Ability to Execute” and the “Completeness of Vision” dimensions. 
  
• No new vendors added and only Nortel removed (due to acquisition), for a total of 14 vendors from last year. This suggests the UC market has crossed the chasm; we’re past the phase of multiple new entrants and are now in the battle for supremacy, partly reflected by several major acquisitions this past year (Nortel, Tandberg). 
  
• All of these vendors have continued to enhance their UC portfolios, proving they believe UC is now the core buying criteria for enterprise communications. 
  
• Each vendor has a core competency (telephony, e-mail/productivity apps, IP networking, or business applications) and seeks to use UC to “expand its footprint within the enterprise.” This matches the three main routes to UC which we have highlighted under "What to Buy" on UCStrategies.com for the past several years.
  
Based on this, the vendors have a tendency of “bundling their lesser-known or weaker UC features with their stronger products.” Details of the pricing trends have been available here at UCStrategies.com since late 2007, and those forecasts have been quite accurate.  

• The vendors not in the Leaders quadrant are critiqued for one primary reason: market coverage. In many cases, Gartner notes the lack of effective sales and service channels outside a single geography or beyond a specific customer size; this issue is a focal point of The UC Summit. In a few cases, Gartner comments that the vendor’s product line, while sufficient to deliver Unified Communications, addresses only a segment of the UC market (e.g. small and mid-sized businesses).     

Overall, the UCMQ points to opportunity, with some barriers to be overcome. On NoJitter.com, Eric Krapf comments on the nature of the barriers; on the other hand my NoJitter.com post highlights the hidden messages that the UC market is poised for growth and that the secrets of success are already visible. Just to recap, those secrets are:

1. “Many leading enterprises are developing UC road maps and plans, and some have trial or phased deployments under way…” The future of the communications industry is being rooted today in those trials and phased deployments. Read the case studies and reference the UCStrategies.com posts, blogs, podcasts, and videos to see this happening. As these trials and phased deployments “go live” on an enterprise-wide basis, the industry evolution will be solidified. Now is the time, for enterprises and vendors alike, to move as fast as possible to grasp the opportunities of UC. 
   
2. Organizations are already changing to accommodate UC. While Gartner points to the requirement for organizational changes to deploy complex UC applications and products, many of those changes have already occurred. Telecom is very often part of the network or infrastructure department.   The e-mail and collaboration IT teams are naturally plugging UC functions into the desktop productivity and workspace products. This may not look like the organization evolution that we expected, but it is organizational evolution, for sure. 
   
3. The misleading observation that UC investments are “frequently... based on a soft ROI or a strategic investment” rather than hard-dollar ROI. Our firm, UniComm Consulting, knows that major hard-dollar savings and even more significant hard-dollar benefits are available through UC – we know because our clients are getting those benefits. Most of the case studies in the UCStrategies.com Case Study Library also point out the quantified hard-dollar benefits.
   
Perhaps those vendors whose UC business are not growing are telling Gartner that soft ROI is the reason, but the facts are otherwise. The apparently fastest growing UC vendor in this UCMQ, Microsoft, who also happens to be the quadrant leader, has been driving the hard dollar cost savings and top-line or bottom-line growth messages very successfully, as noted in the white paper, “Achieving Cost and Resource Savings with Unified Communications.” Believe that UC is a soft-dollar proposition at your own risk.

Anyway, take a look at the report.  It’s worth the read.  Kudos to Bern Elliot and Steve Blood for another fine report.