Understanding the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2020 for UCaaS

The coronavirus pandemic forced a majority of the workforce to work remotely, perhaps impacting your team for the foreseeable future.  While this drastic change became inescapable for many in 2020, it merely accelerated the workplace trend of a work from anywhere future.   

Due to an increasing portion of teams working remotely, many enterprises are migrating to cloud communications platforms such as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for the benefits of greater flexibility and simplicity.   

Businesses like yours will have to make decisions about what resources and providers fit your needs as your workplace continues to evolve.  Where will you look for the right technology and the best providers of UCaaS? Gartner created the UCaaS Magic Quadrant to answer this question.   

What is UCaaS? 

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is software that provides various communications channels on one platform.  As a rule of thumb, UCaaS providers offer: telephony, video meetings, messaging and a mobility client (you can use your cellphone) all on one unified application.   

Who is Gartner? 

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a framework for comparing the competitive ability of vendors in a specific market.  This annual report provides analysis of an industry’s general direction and product maturity.  The purpose of the Gartner Magic Quadrant is to provide insights and actionable advice for businesses like yours to make the right choice for their IT needs for a given technology, in this case UCaaS.   

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a simple, two dimensional matrix.  The graph compares each vendor’s completeness of vision along the X axis and their ability to execute compared to market standards along the Y axis.   

The completeness of vision axis refers to the company’s recent history of innovation and track record of achieving its strategies.  In short, it is a measure of recent innovation success.  Ability to execute is self-explanatory.  Clearly, the better a vendor performs in both categories, the higher and to the right they will be on the graph.   

It is important to keep in mind that the Gartner Magic Quadrant is not just a comparison of simply a technology but it is an evaluation of a holistic vendor in an industry.  Based on which part of the graph they fall on, each vendor is sorted into one of four profiles.  These profiles give insight into each vendor’s role in the industry.   

Top right in the graph, these companies are the most adept at executing according to the market’s standards today.  They also have a strong track record of hitting strategic goals in the past, so you can expect them to continue executing at a high level in the future.  They will continue to lead the industry in the future.   

Visionaries:

Bottom right in the graph, these companies are not executing at the same level as their foremost peers in the industry as it stands.  However, they have a history of hitting strategic goals and matching the future direction of the industry.  You can expect them to impact the industry with their innovation.   

Challengers:

Top left in the graph, these companies are able to execute well and compete against today’s standards.  However, they don’t have as strong of a record hitting strategic goals or innovating so their future ability to execute at the same level is in doubt.   

Niche Players:

Bottom left in the graph, these firms don’t execute as well as the most capable vendors today.  They also don’t have a record of innovating so they are unlikely to influence the future direction of the industry.  These firms tend to specialize in smaller subsets of the broader market.   

 

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