Cisco Systems’ on-premises Unified Communications solutions have leapfrogged Microsoft to take top billing in an influential industry review.
Industry advisory specialist Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report places Cisco’s UC offering number 1 for completeness of vision and ability to execute, overtaking last year’s leaders Microsoft.
This report specifically analyzed the on-premises enterprise UC solutions offered by leading providers in the US. Smaller providers and cloud UC solutions were dealt with in separate reports.
Movers and Shakers
The ‘Magic Quadrant’ ranks provision according to two key criteria, completeness of vision and ability to execute, which are plotted against two axes. The position plotted against these two criteria determines which of four quadrants a company appears in - Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players.
Although the four names appearing in the Leaders quadrant held steady from last year’s report - Cisco, Microsoft, Mittel and Avaya - the drop from top spot will be seen as mark against Microsoft’s heavy investment in enterprise UC this year. Not only has the Windows brand giant leveraged its ownership of Skype to launch Skype for Business in place of its Lync business comms platform, it has added Cloud PBX to plug the gap in its telephony offering.
