The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2014 is here, highlighting several important trends and changes in the UC landscape. Let's look first at the quadrants, then focus on what this means and on how the market is changing, from Gartner's perspective. (Note: If you are a Gartner subscriber, this is Research Report G00262527. Also, Microsoft offers a reprint link here.)
Mobile communications are changing the way we work and do business, especially the role of telephony. In addition to enabling business users to dynamically make contact and exchange information in a variety of modes (real-time voice/video, chat, asynchronous messaging, social messaging, automated notifications, etc.) with a single, multimodal, mobile device, they also benefit from having direct access to information, online business applications, and having "contextual" information relating to the people they contact and the subject matter they have been communicating about.
Leaders from all aspects of the Unified Communications (UC) industry are gathering in La Jolla, California, April 27-30, 2014, for a two and a half day conference, focusing on networking, building new relationships, product/market education and aligning business models with evolving and emerging technologies. Topics include mobility, wireless, WebRTC, cloud, SDN, hosted, hybrid cloud, MDM and contact center.
The UC Summit is approaching, with much to look forward to. This year's summit, held in La Jolla, California from April 27-30, will focus on UC industry trends such as mobility, WebRTC, the cloud, SDN, and more, enabling attendees to make new connections and learn more about emerging technologies and trends.
While they have not been widely recognized as a force in enterprise mobile networking, HP has quietly been assembling the pieces of an extensive mobility portfolio. While many companies focus on one or two areas in mobile, HP supports the entire breadth of the mobility spectrum from mobile devices to applications development/testing tools, wireless network infrastructure and back-end systems. One key component of the HP mobility value add is their Mobility Transformation Experience Workshops.
I spend far too much time with data on solution providers, i.e. VARs, MSPs, Service Providers, etc., so I decided to put together the numbers for the channel companies we have identified in North American that sell and service UC solutions - about 3,000 company headquarters. I included the vendors from the recent Gartner UC Enterprise Study excluding Huawei and Toshiba because I didn't feel our data was a good representation of their channel.
There is a simple test for judging the success of applications. If they are easy to use, there's a good chance they'll succeed. If not, their future is dark. This formula is being played out now in the mobile unified communications (UC) space.
Looking at apps today on smartphones and tablets - some are intuitive, some aren't. If people are trying to access apps and they aren't simple to use, people will forget about them.
I'm done with mobility. Not the concept, the term. For years now the UC promise has included the "work from anywhere" mantra. Work is not a place. Make/receive calls from your mobile device. Participate in meetings from anywhere. Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb.
Acme Packet has recently announced enhancements to its Net-Net Session Driver for voice over LTE (VoLTE). With these enhancements, mobile service providers can deliver reliable, seamless voice call handover to 2G and 3G networks even when subscribers are outside of LTE coverage areas, as well as addressing newly defined IP Multimedia Subsystem functions for VoLTE call continuity.