Much may come to mind regarding the topic of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). The industry has been evolving, and today UCaaS offerings vary in features, functionalities, scalability, regional coverage, support, and the ability to address specific use cases. As a result, Gartner developed 2019 Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications as a Service, Global report to educate IT leaders responsible for planning, selecting, and deploying unified communications and collaboration. The report is an evaluation of 12 vendors, based on 10 critical capabilities, and five use cases.
Today, Gartner announced the results of their findings. In 4 out of 5 use cases that included a range of business sizes and UCaaS requirements, RingCentral scored highest.
Recommendations for Digital Workplace application leaders include:
- Take inventory of must-have enterprise telephony features required by organization user groups. Leverage usage reporting and call detail reports of the current solution to aid in compiling this list. Make it part of the functional requirements and eliminate UCaaS providers that can’t satisfy them.
- Request a list of countries where providers have full PSTN replacement capabilities. Multinational organizations with large international locations prefer vendors that can deliver native, full PSTN replacement in those locations; local or regional support; and localization. This preference includes language and currency over those that provide only a gateway solution to connect to local telephone operators, remote support, and can’t support as many locales.
- Confirm a provider’s ability to deliver projects and operate a high-quality service by scheduling live proof-of-concept tests/evaluations, and also obtain references that match your own organization’s profiles. This is particularly important for enterprises with complex requirements, such as support of various telephony use cases, multinational deployments, business application integration and compliance regulations.
- Reduce risk by evaluating UCaaS vendor solutions with POC trials that match organizations’ UC use cases. POCs should run for four to eight weeks and, typically, focus only on functional aspects of the solution, rather than availability or performance.
Among the key findings cited in the report, “In 2019, the adoption of unified communications as a service continues to grow strongly across all market segments. From 2017 through 2022, the rate at which organizations deploy cloud telephony will more than double, from about 14% of users to 32% of users.”
Download a complimentary copy of the 2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications as a Service, Global Report.
*Source: Gartner, Inc., “2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications as a Service, Global” Daniel O’Connell, Megan Fernandez, Rafael Benitez, Christopher Trueman, Sebastian Hernandez, October 14, 2019. Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide,” Daniel O’Connell, Megan Fernandez, Rafael Benitez, Christopher Trueman, Sebastian Hernandez, 30 July 2019.
Disclaimer
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.
Originally published Nov 05, 2019, updated Aug 07, 2020