Today, the UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) market is making the transformation into a must-have solution for enterprise delivery according to the research published by world leader "Gartner". Now, many UCaaS providers are supporting global solutions for the market.
UCaaS largely supports the same functions as its premise-based counterpart for unified communications, but instead it follows a model of cloud service delivery. As the UCaaS market continues to grow faster than the typical market, vendors are now investing in cloud-based solutions for conferencing, telephony, messaging, voice, and communications platforms. Though 16 vendors made it into Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant, including "IT giants like Microsoft and Google." today we're going to look a little closer at the four segments, and their leaders.
How Entrants Approached the Quadrants
Gartner evaluated vendors that have been utilising the global UCaaS platforms, and have developed their own UCaaS stack of applications. Vendors need build, design, upgrade, and support, and must operate the UCaaS platform perfectly. Other vendors needed to offer a global service, or systems integration selling UCaaS through a third-party platform.
Each vendor that made the quadrant was required to be able to offer services in the three regions of Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Northern America. Support for other regions such as the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa were deemed favourable but not mandatory.
The Magic Quadrant rates vendors based on their ability to execute new solutions and offer complete visions for the future of UCaaS. As such, each vendor is split into four categories:
- Niche Players (Limited vision and execution)
- Visionaries (Excellent vision but limited execution)
- Challengers (Excellent execution but low vision)
- Leaders (Ideal for execution and vision)
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Gartner's Magic Quadrant for UCaaS 2016[/caption]
The "Leader" Quadrant
Application expert RingCentral is one of the top UCaaS providers in the industry in terms of supported endpoints, revenue, and UCaaS employees, per Gartner's report. The California-based company uses a multi-tenant solution known as RingCentral Office, with a comprehensive UC suite. RingCentral also recently added a work stream collaboration opportunity to its suite through its acquisition of a cloud messaging company "Glip" in 2015.
RingCentral is now making its largest change in the enterprise market by forming a new partnership with Google and Avant Communications. It's no wonder that this company is the "number one leader" for the Magic Quadrant in terms of vision.
