Gartner: Big Changes Afoot for UCGartner: Big Changes Afoot for UC

Which of today's UC vendors will own the future? It's anybody's guess.

As always, the Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UC MQ) report, published July 13, is a concise summary of the UC marketplace and vendors. Well-established Gartner UC experts Bern Elliot, Steve Blood, and Megan Marek Fernandez authored the report, with a focus on on-premises UC for large enterprises (Gartner covers midmarket UC and UC as a service in separate MQ reports).

This year's UC MQ takes on increased importance, as Gartner has discontinued the Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony. The IT analyst firm felt a separate telephony MQ was no longer needed since UC capabilities have become the primary planning and procurement criteria, Gartner sources have indicated. This results in "an emphasis on vendors' telephony capabilities" for 2016, the Gartner analysts noted in the UC MQ.

"The primary goal of all UC solutions is to improve user productivity and to enhance the business processes related to communications and collaboration," the UC MQ states. This aligns with the long-held UC Strategies definition of UC: "Communications integrated to optimize business processes."

As always in an MQ, the Gartner analysts categorized vendors into four quadrants. This year's breakdown is:

And here's a look at the dynamics of the relative positioning since 2015:

However, even as Gartner places an increased emphasis on telephony, much of the report points to a future direction that is far removed from that discipline. "Adjacent markets play a critical role in how UC is evolving," as the Gartner analysts state in the report.

Given the critical importance of moving into adjacencies, you will see that most vendors are urgently hedging their bets against the declines in revenues, margins, and unit volumes in the rapidly consolidating corporate telephony market space. Here are a few points that jump out for me:

Clearly, big changes are afoot, and there is no assurance that the IP PBX-based UC players (all of them except Microsoft) in this year's UC MQ will own the future. In general, it seems the best strategy for most enterprises over the next few years is to focus their UC investments on pilot projects linked to specific usage profiles that leverage these emerging forms of communications, precisely directed toward optimizing business processes or producing measurable user productivity. This will still be UC, but a new kind of UC, for sure.

May you have great success in transforming your organization with UC.

Note: You can get a complimentary copy of the 2016 UC MQ from vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco.