Sponsored By

Mid-Market and Enterprise Vote Atos Unify as Best PBXMid-Market and Enterprise Vote Atos Unify as Best PBX

The Eastern Management Group explains why Atos Unify receives thumbs-up in competition among 33 UC providers for businesses with more than 300 employees.

John Malone

September 10, 2020

4 Min Read
Mid-Market and Enterprise Vote Atos Unify as Best PBX
Image: gustavofrazao - stock.adobe.com

Atos has been making headlines in the news with its announcement of "Unify Office by RingCentral." With this offering, Atos gets a fast-tracked cloud product for resale and shaves years off the process of building a UCaaS solution from scratch. But the real story is upstream, with Atos Unify mid-market and enterprise customers.


In the Eastern Management Group's satisfaction survey "2020 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction," Atos Unify ranked highest in Customer Satisfaction by mid-market and enterprise PBX Customers. Unify led 33 PBX providers, including Cisco and Avaya, for the top spot. All PBX technologies (i.e., IP PBX, hosted, hybrid, and server virtualization) were part of the study. More than 4,000 IT manager customers worldwide participated in the research. Eastern Management Group classifies businesses with more than 300 employees as mid-market and more than 500 employees as enterprise.


Customer Measurements
Unify was first overall in seven of 12 customer satisfaction measurements in three categories:

  1. Product: technology & product, management tools

  2. Vendor Experience: installation, billing, support

  3. Customer Delight: overall satisfaction, recommend to a friend

 

UC Applications Scorecard
In a corollary study, the Eastern Management Group asked Unify PBX customers to identify their most valuable UC applications. These customers reported receiving value from all 12 UC applications examined, and very high value from mobility, messaging, VoIP, and SIP.


Mid-market and Enterprise PBX Portfolio
As a cohort, mid-market and enterprise businesses show a large, sustainable demand for premises PBXs. According to "Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2020-2027," 50% of all PBXs bought in 2019 by these sizable companies were premises-based; some 23-26% were UCaaS.

Unify’s on-site PBX products provide carrier-grade reliability and scalability to 500,000 users. The company's key PBX solutions for mid-market and enterprise are:

OpenScape Business: This is an all-in-one UC solution for companies with one or more locations. It includes presence, conferencing, contact center, messaging, IM, mobility, and fax. The PBX is scalable from two to 2000 users for standalone and multi-site environments.

OpenScape Enterprise: This is a scalable PBX from 200 to 5,000 users at unlimited sites. All locations get centrally managed by the customer's data center. Installation and setup are streamlined to save customers up to 40% over alternative systems.

OpenScape 4000: This is a single system that scales to 12,000 users. The architecture is Hybrid TDM/IP-PBX. Since the PBX system is a workhorse, it's equipped with an active-standby dual node architecture.

OpenScape UC Application V10: This is a highly open UC solution that integrates with all existing applications for customers with up to 15,000 users. The system is based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integrates itself in different IT and telephony environments as well as in legacy-based Microsoft or HCL (IBM) applications. Presence, rich presence, and instant messaging (chat) are among the best UC applications on the market.

Eastern Management Group's survey of Unify customers finds concentrations in these vertical markets ranked as follows: electronics, professional services, communications (service provider), construction and engineering, energy and utilities, automotive, healthcare, and retail. Unify, on its own, reports the company's specialty vertical markets are: financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, public sector and defense, major events, resources, and services.

 

Unify is a Tradition, Not Just a Company
Long before Atos Unify, there was Siemens AG (parent), IBM (grandparent), and ROLM (great grandparent) - AKA developer of the first digital PBX. Atos Unify is just the latest generation in a family of proud PBX artisans, all cut from the same DNA, producing high-quality PBXs distributed by respected expert partners. Years ago, while sharing a bottle or two of Meursault with ROLM's founder Ken Oshman, at a NY French restaurant, he pledged ROLM to be the best-of-the-best PBX companies destined to be the number one provider of business phone systems, which it then became, and not to my surprise. Today, for mid-market and enterprise customers, the company delivers on that pledge as Atos Unify.

It can't be ignored that Unify is the digital solutions part of Atos SE, which itself is a 12 billion euro company with a staff of 110,000. Mid-market and enterprise customers have high expectations of companies that sell and support them with PBXs, and Atos delivers as much in more than 100 countries.

The research used in this post comes from the following Eastern Management Group sources: "Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2020-2027" and "2020 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction Report.” For more information on these studies and reports, please contact John Malone directly at 212-738-9402 Ext. 2201 or [email protected].

About the Author

John Malone

John Malone is the President and CEO of The Eastern Management Group. He heads one of the world's premier communications industry research companies. He is also the author of three books.

In addition to Eastern Management, he founded two other software and database management companies. He has served on the board of directors of numerous publicly traded, and private technology companies.

At The Eastern Management Group, he has managed thousands of the company's research assignments for major technology businesses and service providers worldwide.

John Malone is a former executive with AT&T. While there he developed the first call center.

He has advised Members and Staff of The US House of Representatives, US Senate, Department of Justice, FCC, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, State Legislatures, State Regulatory Commissions and the European Commission. He has testified extensively before the US Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies on technology matters. His research and analysis of telecommunications and Internet policy have been presented at the Cato Institute and FreedomWorks.

His insights and views have been frequently reported in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Business Week. Fortune magazine called John Malone the leading analyst in the industry.

John Malone has served on the Board of Directors of American Fiber Systems acquired by Zayo, Valere Power acquired by Eltek Energy, In Motion Technology acquired by Sierra Wireless, Phaethon Communications acquired by TeraXion, Applied Digital Access acquired by Dynatech, VINA Technologies acquired by Larscom, and Larscom acquired by Verilink. He also served on the University of Dayton Alumni Board of Directors. He holds a BS and MBA from the University of Dayton.