Though Microsoft and Zoom both earned a spot for themselves in the “leader” category for this year’s Gartner “meeting room solutions” Magic Quadrant, it’s Cisco that’s truly leading the way. Designed to provide customers with an insight into some of the most innovative and reliable vendors in the current market space, the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant sorts a handful of the world’s most intuitive brands into four key categories of success.
As the name would suggest, the “leader” category is by far the most coveted of them all, indicating a vendor’s performance in both “completeness of vision”, and “ability to execute.” In other words, if you want to be a leader in Gartner’s books, it’s not enough to have a great idea, you need to be able to bring that idea to market too. Cisco’s impeccable range of meeting room solutions earned them the top spot this year, but what is it that makes the brand such a powerful competitor?
How Did Cisco Become a Leader?
According to Gartner, “meeting room solutions” are services that blend collaboration and communication to streamline and enhance workstream experiences. This is an area that Cisco has specialised in for some time now, with developments like Cisco Webex, Cisco Meeting Server, and Cisco Spark.
In order to establish Cisco as a leader in the space, Gartner looked at a range of criteria for their top fourteen vendors, including things like “ease of use”, and innovation. If you look at the success behind Cisco’s meeting room services, it’s clear to see how they’ve earned their place at the head of the crowd, with over 50 billion annual meeting minutes to their name.
Cisco commits themselves to offering their clients the solutions that they need, built on the latest technology, whether for on-premises solutions, cloud, or hybrid deployments. From a rich feature set to a simple and appealing user experience that spans across a range of devices, Cisco has built everything they needed to establish their strength in the marketplace.
Maintaining their Leadership Potential
Of course, Cisco isn’t planning to simply rest on their laurels after this latest win. According to the brand, the operations and engineering team will be continuing to develop their meeting room solutions to adhere to the ever-changing needs of customers, looking into things like:
- Background noise detection to minimise workplace distractions
- Implementing one-click mobile meetings
- Using intelligent views and analytics to make the meeting room even smarter
- Adding artificial intelligence for more powerful collaboration experiences
- Expanding UC options with facial recognition and advanced speech solutions
- Bringing virtual reality into the meeting room with Cisco Spark
In fact, you can already explore that last one for yourself, by downloading the Cisco Spark VR beta through Oculus Rift.
As the technology around us continues to change, it makes sense that Cisco would want to focus on maintaining their position on top by adapting to the needs of their target audience. We’re interested to see how the brand will continue to innovate and improve the meeting room space.
