Cisco Unified Communications Delivers a Full Experience As I read the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications by Bern Elliot and Steve Blood, August 10, 2015, one word stood out: full. full:  adjective – not lacking or omitting anything; complete It’s a word that Gartner mentions when describing leaders. “Leaders have a full UC offering and strong market presence, and demonstrate success in the field. They have a strong presence in related markets to expand their footprint in UC. These vendors and their channel partners have experience delivering UC to a broad range of enterprise types and into most geographic regions.” We believe our position as a leader for unified communications in this year’s report reflects that fullness. This is especially evident in our position as furthest to the right for “Completeness of Vision.” In recent years, we’ve focused on defining and executing a product vision to deliver the most value to you, our customers. This comes with an emphasis on three key initiatives: Deliver the best premises-based experience. We’re simplifying everything from purchasing and licensing to provisioning and configuration. We’re delivering an unmatched in-meeting experience across every device and application. Expand our cloud-collaboration footprint. New cloud-first SaaS applications and services like Cisco Spark, Collaboration Meeting Rooms, and more build from the Cisco Collaboration Cloud Platform. (Learn more from Jonathan Rosenberg’s post.) Seamlessly connect on-premises infrastructure and endpoints with cloud offerings. Our strategy is to ensure that Cisco and our partners can always deliver the right service to the right user at the right price. Check out this year’s report and let me know what you think of Cisco’s full UC offering. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. ... View more

Did you know that Lync is a fully supported client in Cisco Collaboration Meeting Room (Cisco CMR) meetings. When we say interoperability we mean it. Even when that means supporting proprietary protocols. For instance, to ensure that Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business users can fully experience the power of Cisco conferencing. IDC released the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications and Collaboration 2015 Vendor Assessment last month. In it, Rich Costello notes that Cisco is “perennially the worldwide market share leader in enterprise IP telephony solutions, as well as advanced capabilities such as telepresence, Web conferencing services, and enterprise session border control (SBC).” (Thank you IDC.) That doesn’t mean we’re the only option. People sometimes need to use third-party endpoints and applications to connect to Cisco meetings. We’ve enabled Lync users to participate in Cisco conferences with high-quality voice and video for years. Now we’ve enhanced that experience by enabling them to also fully share and view content. This functionality and other enhancements – massive scalability increases, customizable layouts, and simple user-based licensing – have earned recognition across the industry. A recent example: Cisco Conferencing Experience was named “Best New Conferencing System Product” at Infocomm 2015. Find out more from TechWiseTV’s Robb Boyd. See how Cisco CMR allows people to interact with voice, video, IM, and content sharing — no matter what application or endpoint they’re using. And learn about interoperability with Lync via cloud, on premises, and hybrid deployments. ... View more

For the seventh year in a row Cisco was positioned as a leader in the August 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant forUnified Communications. In the accompanying Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications document, published July 2014, Cisco also received the highest ratings in Full UC with Strong Telephony and Ability to Offer Hybrid Solutions use cases. We believe our continued recognition in these key industry assessments demonstrates that the focus on simplicity and user experience across the Cisco Collaboration portfolio is delivering our customers the productivity gains they are looking for through a collaboration experience that only Cisco can deliver. According to Gartner,  “The primary goal of unified communications (UC) is to improve user productivity and to enhance business processes. Gartner defines UC products (equipment, software and services) as those that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to obtain that goal…UC products integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices.” Cisco shares this vision for UC and continues to deliver key innovations and integrations to ensure our customers are clearly benefiting from the full suite of Cisco’s leading  telephony, video , web conferencing , messaging , IM/P and contact center offerings. In the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, Gartner once again positioned Cisco as a leader for ability to execute and completeness of vision.  The report identifies strengths and cautions for individual vendors and we feel the strengths for Cisco UC offering are: End-to-End portfolio :  We are particularly proud of the full suite of solutions that Cisco offers and the level of integration happening across those solutions to enable enterprise, B2B and B2C unified communications that are comprehensive and interoperable. Management: One of the strongest pieces of the Cisco UC solution is our unified management offering. Prime Collaboration provides a single pane of glass for configuration, provisioning, monitoring and analytics that now spans voice, video, endpoints, messaging, presence and mobility . Buyer Reach: Great effort goes into educating and training a global network of Cisco partners, consultants and employees on how to deploy and configure Cisco UC solutions to ensure our buyers get the best UC experience available.  Thanks to all of them for helping us earn this recognition. Deployment Flexibility :  An end-to-end portfolio and a history of delivering SaaS offerings have afforded Cisco and our partners many opportunities to deliver UC services from the cloud as well as spanning cloud and premises with new innovative hybrid models. In the 2014 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications, Gartner evaluates the effectiveness of vendors in addressing users’ needs in four primary use cases. Cisco received the highest product score in two out of four use cases ( Full UC With Strong Telephony Requirement and Ability to Offer Hybrid Solutions – scores below) and scored second highest in the other two use cases (Full UC with Strong Collaboration Requirement andAbility to Work with Other Vendors – see report for full scores and details). We feel this once again highlights our strength in Telephony, our commitment to Collaboration, our demonstrated Interoperability and our innovation in Cloud and Hybrid offerings. With an end-to-end portfolio of solutions encompassing everything from infrastructure to endpoints, spanning voice, video, IM/P, conferencing, contact centers and more, I’m continually amazed by the innovation and visionary thinking that happens in this organization. With these reports and recent recognition from multiple analysts for our leadership in Video Infrastructure, it’s evident that analysts and customers feel the same way. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. ... View more