Cisco and Avaya Leaders Again
Cisco and Avaya were once again identified as industry leaders. This time, by a new IDC worldwide unified communications Marketscape report. The report claims to use a “rigorous scoring methodology that produces a definititive assessment of each vendro’s current market capabilities and stategies.”
IDC placed Cisco and Avaya in the Leaders category for 2011/2012 with several others, including Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Siemens, NEC, IBM, and ShoreTel, recognized as Major Players. The report also evaluated Aastra, Digium, Huawei, and Interactive Intelligence – which evidently are not “major players.” That seems like a slippery slope as all of those four have compelling value propositions of their own.
Additional findings from the report include:
— Customers must identify tools and features that are most appropriate for their organization, and which source(s) they should turn to for those selected features and tools.
— SIP trunking is finally gaining real momentum among carriers.
— Some of the most powerful UC customer success stories emanate from business process flows within vertical markets such as healthcare, education, financials, manufacturing, etc.
— A business case for UC has to include a mix of IT and business benefits.
The high level conclusions of this “rigorous scoring methodology” seem fairly obvious – the market share leaders are “Leaders”, and the trends we’ve all been talking about for the past year are trends. What is new this year for IDC is to consider each vendor’s whole UC portfolio instead of only the voice/telephony piece.