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Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 31 July 2013 ID:G00251797 Analyst(s): Bern Elliot, Steve Blood VIEW SUMMARY 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 deployment and increasing end-user adoption will continue to mature during the next several years. Market Definition/Description The primary goal of unified communications (UC) is to improve user productivity and to enhance business processes. Gartner defines UC products (equipment, software and services) as those that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to obtain that goal. This can include the control, management and integration of these methods. UC products integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices. UC offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and perform. The UC products may be composed of a single vendor (stand-alone) suite, or customers may deploy a portfolio of integrated applications and platforms spanning multiple vendors. In many cases, UC is deployed to extend and add functionality to established communications investments. UC products are used by people to facilitate personal communications and by enterprises to support workgroup and collaborative communications and business workflows. Some UC products may extend UC outside company boundaries to enhance communications among organizations, support interactions among large public communities or for personal communications. UC applications are increasingly being integrated or offered in concert with collaboration applications to form unified communications and collaboration (UCC) and, in some cases, are being integrated with business applications and workflows, something Gartner calls communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs). It is useful to divide UC into six broad communications product areas: · Voice and telephony — This area includes fixed, mobile and soft telephony, as well as the evolution of PBXs and IP PBXs. This category includes options for voice and video that bypass traditional connectivity methods, such as direct Internet-based connections. · Conferencing — This area includes voice (audio) conferencing, videoconferencing, Web conferencing that includes document and application sharing capabilities, and various forms of unified conferencing capabilities. · Messaging — This area includes email, which has become an indispensable business tool, voice mail and various approaches to unified messaging (UM). · 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 publication of presence and location information between (from and to) multiple sources. This enhanced functionality is sometimes called rich presence. · Clients — Unified clients enable access to multiple communications functions from a consistent interface. These may have different forms, including thick desktop clients, thin browser clients and clients for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, as well as specialized clients embedded within business applications. · Communications-enabled applications — This broad group of applications has directly integrated communications functionality. Key application areas include collaboration applications, contact center applications, notification applications, and consolidated administration, reporting and/or analytics tools. Eventually, other applications that support business processes will be communications-enabled; these might include integrating UC with hospital applications to improve doctor-nurse transaction processing workflows or to improve doctor-doctor collaboration activities, or adding communications to purchasing/order processing applications to improve the accuracy and speed of those processes. When business applications are integrated with communications applications to improve operations, Gartner calls them CEBPs. The stakes for vendors in the enterprise UC market are exceedingly high and, in some cases, existential. The stakes for enterprise decision makers are also high due to the significant costs, visibility and business impacts of their choice. Five UC characteristics will have an important effect on the success of a UC product and the satisfaction of users: · User experience (UX) — The quality and effectiveness of the overall user experience (UX) across all devices will heavily influence the effectiveness of the solution, its adoption rate and, ultimately, enterprise productivity. While consolidated administration and management are important characteristics of a successful solution, it is the high-quality end-user experience that will drive adoption and productivity. · Mobility — User expectations of how UC solutions leverage mobility continue to escalate. In addition to demanding full UC functionality on mobile devices, users are starting to expect mobile devices to be integrated with desktop devices to allow for a more powerful work environment and to integrate UC with mobile consumer applications. In this year's Magic Quadrant evaluation, we again place extra weight on mobility as it remains a key differentiator and requirement. · Interoperability — Enterprises wish to avoid "closed gardens" and vendor lock-in, while enabling intercompany B2B, business-to-partner (B2P) and business-to-consumer (B2C) federation. Additionally, many enterprises will find their needs best served by using several vendors, either because of legacy investments or to enable a best-of-breed configuration. This research considers how vendors address these critical emerging interoperability requirements. · Cloud and hybrid — Integration of on-premises UC with cloud and hybrid UC services continues to play an increasingly important role as these options mature. While these options are considered in this Magic Quadrant's evaluations, "Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications" provides a more specific review of these capabilities. · Broad solution appeal — Successful UC solutions must be attractive to a broad and diverse audience of enterprise decision influencers. In addition to the end users, enterprise decision influencers span such diverse groups as IT, telecom, data communications, the audio-visual video group and members of the executive suite. Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications
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发表于 2014-3-8 11:48:03
