We often discuss the roles of mobility and the uptake of BYOD in transforming the business communications sector. The impact on the unified communications (UC) market has been significant and important decisions are being based on continuous changes to how people work together in the business environment.
Increasingly, businesses require more flexible, scalable and feature-rich communication and collaboration capabilities that support remote work and BYOD. These capabilities are driving decision-making on the UC front, according to the recent “Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications” report from Gartner (News - Alert), and the focus has shifted to single-vendor platforms to meet the needs of business UC requirements.
Gartner found that while UC solutions have been steadily maturing to meet market demands, vendors typically augment their core offerings with additional products to provide customers with the scale and functionality they demand. Desktop solutions and mobile videoconferencing have become important components in UC, offering a compelling value add for businesses. The market also faces competition from cloud-based collaboration services and the landscape becomes even more confusing when a single vendor offers both on-premises and cloud-based UC offerings.
The research firm recommends that businesses evaluating UC solutions should conduct user analysis within their own organizations to understand the specific needs of their workers and if the UC solution meets telephony and collaboration requirements. IT management should also look at hybrid solutions with some cloud capabilities to meet their needs and can also use a bimodal approach when it comes to managing existing UC solutions and next-gen workstream collaboration tools.
Gartner found that the most effective UC solutions offer telephony, conferencing, instant messaging and presence and a client user interface. “We are increasingly seeing a need for organizations to replace legacy telephony platforms (both PBX (News - Alert) and IP-PBX),” states the report. “This places a stronger focus on an encompassing set of telephony requirements to meet the broadest set of user requirements, in addition to the need for tightly integrated suite capabilities. Collectively, we anticipate that this will offer a more intuitive user experience as well as address the need for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of maintaining separate product platforms.”
The report also rates the top UC vendors based on telephony and collaboration features, as well as their usefulness for mid-size organizations and their ability to offer hybrid solutions. Vendors assessed include ALE, Avaya, Cisco (News - Alert), Huawei, Interactive Intelligence, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC, ShoreTel and Unify.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi