Gartner places Cisco UC in the Leaders Quadrant
Cisco has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report published by research and advisory firm, Gartner, Inc. in September 2008, and authored by Bern Elliot. This report positions vendors in one of four quadrants based on the company's vision and its ability to execute on that vision. The four quadrants are: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.
Gartner believes that Cisco Unified Communications solutions can help your company:
- Facilitate collaboration to quickly adapt to changing market conditions
- Increase productivity
- Strengthen its competitive advantage through speed and innovation
- Deliver a rich-media experience across any workspace, securely and with optimal quality
These solutions, available both on-premises and on demand, give customers greater choice and flexibility while providing powerful new ways to collaborate both inside and outside their organizations.
According to Gartner, the Leaders quadrant contains vendors selling comprehensive and integrated UC solutions that directly or, with well-defined partnerships, address the full range of market needs. These vendors have defined migration and evolution plans for their products in core UC areas and are using their solution sets to enter new clients into their client rosters and to expand their footprints in their client bases in new function areas.
Strengths
- Cisco has a strong overall product portfolio, with particular strengths in two critical UC areas: live voice and conferencing. Its VoIP-related products, built around Unified Communications Manager, remain a particular strength for Cisco. Similarly, Unified MeetingPlace conferencing solutions, combined with the WebEx and Telepresence products, provide strong, though often separate, conferencing solutions.
- Cisco is expanding integration across its products, offering access to key products via public standards, and is expanding its business application integration options.
- Cisco continues its strong influence within the network groups in the IT and operations departments.
- The company's vision for integrating the WebEx service and Enterprise premise architectures provides a promising long-term direction.
- Cisco has a strong channel program and global reach for data and voice communications, coupled with good positioning with enterprise chief technology officers and IT personnel.
- Evaluate Cisco UC solutions when you have or plan to have Cisco for key voice and conferencing functions. However, ensure that any expected interoperability with other vendor products, as well as among your planned Cisco products, is available.
