Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC Results – Customer View is Very Different

We thought we would provide some feedback on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications from a customer view (whether large enterprise, government; or a small business like FOX GROUP that uses various UC apps every day).

Listening to my fellow UC Experts during a recent podcast where we discussed the report, I agree that the report is really focused on the industry view of the UC offers and views product maturity from a product development perspective, and certainly not from a client perspective. Most, if not all, of our enterprise, government and non-profit clients at FOX GROUP DO NOT consider the UC technology arena to be a mature technology environment. This is based on our discussions with them as part of their acquisition and deployment journey of UC solutions from many of the vendors listed.

As we all know, many VARs, system integrators and carriers throughout the world say and sincerely believe that they can successfully sell, implement and support UC solutions. I completely agree with my fellow UC experts' comments that it is very important for all potential UC customers to define both their technology requirements, as well as their business support expectations.

From the Trenches

From our client acquisition, implementation and integration experience, combined with our day-to-day use of various Cloud/hosted UC applications, the vendors certainly are NOT mature in any way shape or form, particularly if you have problems. When problems happen in trying to use the UC applications, there is always lots of finger pointing. More disappointing is the lack of ability and interest by the various vendors to work together to help clients troubleshoot all of the levels of technology, i.e. SIP trunks, Internet backbone, VLANs, desktop or laptop computer, soft clients, headsets, etc.

Advice to the Industry

All of the industry players need to help their sales, installation and project professionals develop the skills to sell, service and support multi-vendor solutions that make up ALL of the pieces of UC solutions before I will consider them mature. They also need to develop capabilities and best practices to help develop real world cost of ownership and ROI benefits on how these technologies have improved their customers' businesses. This would be another one of the customer-type factors I would consider in order to score UC technologies as being mature! Other technology applications have been able to do this for years, i.e. ERP solutions, HR solutions, manufacturing solutions, to name a few.

Customer Score of Vendors

If I was to score the UC leaders on their placements from a customer perspective on their ability to install, integrate and support integrated UC solutions, the visual would look very different from this year’s report. Maybe we should start to work with the end user customers who purchase and try to use these types of complex solutions, and do our own UC scoring from the customer viewpoint. I welcome hearing your  on your UC vendor scoring. 

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2015 – The Maturity Maze, by Marty Parker
• UCStrategies Reviews Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, Industry Buzz podcast

4 Responses to "Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC Results – Customer View is Very Different" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 8/31/2015 12:44:47 PM

Roberta,

Glad to see you poking holes in HOW UC gets implemented and how to measure the operational benefits that both end users and the business processes thry are involved with will benefit. To do this properly, you really have to look first at UCaaS, not the costs of yesterdays premise-based technologies.

Int6egrating everything for UC is best done in clouds that can connect everybody with everything, not on the limited resources of premise-based hardware.

Peter Huboi 9/4/2015 2:27:12 PM

Roberta,

I'll offer another proof point to your observation. At Polycom, we have a blog called The View. Most posts will get from a few hundred to a few thousand views. When John Partridge (Polycom's Services Porfolio Manager for Microsoft Communications Professional Services) wrote a blog post titled "How do I plan, deploy, and roll out Lync UC most effectively?" ... it quickly got 20,000 views. Its a great checklist of everything to consider to make the planning, installation, integration, and training go right . https://community.polycom.com/t5/The-View/How-do-I-plan-deploy-and-roll-out-Lync-UC-most-effectively/ba-p/68688

Greg Zweig 9/9/2015 2:25:22 PM

Roberta,
I don't discount your point -- it's not all wine and roses (mostly whine...).

However, I think it's also fair to point out that maturity in our industry is typically a reference to proprietary TDM PBXs developed in the late 1980s and 1990s (Definity, M1, etc). These were cradle to grave programs where nearly ever piece was home grown or OEM'd for a well defined purpose. Regardless of who made it, it was tested for years and all aspects of its lifecycle were managed. They were and still are tremendous products. However, the truth is that those days will never return as the raw ingredients that created that recipe are gone. Neither Bell Labs nor BNR really exist, nor do their multi-year R&D efforts, funded with tens of millions of dollars and staffed by thousands of dedicated engineers.

Those days are over. Our industry made a conscious decision to embrace IP, COTS and BYOD hardware, open source software and standards-based clients. We've benefited with exponential reductions in costs and incredible innovation. I'm constantly impressed by how our world has changed over the past 15 years!

Ultimately, I think that we struggle because we now want to assemble a solution from 6 or 8 vendors (including the cost benefits and innovation) and get the same experience (and support) we got when we bought it from one. To Art's point, UCaaS really obscures many of the complexities - I'm a shameless advocate of our Nuvia Cloud and Kandy PaaS solutions. However, we all have to appreciate that it's still not the same as the "mature" world we used to know and I don't think we should expect that.

J.R. Simmons 9/27/2015 3:30:05 PM

UCaaS may obscure many of the complexities, but it does not eliminate many of the problems Roberta mentions. Our clients still hear the "somebody else's problem" reaction to quality concerns, functional shortcomings, and integration challenges. Even when the UCaaS provider is responsible for the other products involved in the solution, it seems to be difficult for the UCaaS vendors to produce the experience implied by Gartner's measurement of the manufacturer's capabilities.