Microsoft Makes the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony 2008
Yes, you’re eyes are still working! It’s true. The unrelenting push by Microsoft to make a product that delivers some version of enterprise telephony has broken into the Gartner MQ for that exclusive club, Corporate Telephony, that was published only last Friday, August 8.
Now, most of you know that Microsoft had already propelled itself to the Leaders quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2007, but this is PBX and IP-PBX territory.
What’s the catch? Well, Microsoft is in the lower right quadrant — the Visionaries quadrant. That’s the place for companies with completeness of vision, and Microsoft is rated far to the top (the right on the x-axis) on that scale, but still with work to do on “ability to excute”.
While some may say this is bad for Microsoft, since they will look weak in the telephony group, it seems to me that this is ideal for them! It says that Gartner sees Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 as addressing the future directions of Corporate Telephony, but isn’t ready to do it all. That’s great. I’ve argued before that Microsoft does not want to win as a leader in the PBX market, they want to win as a leader in the “communications” market, where their software can make major improvements in business operations, not just simply replace a phone.
Gartner suggests that Microsoft OCS is on target for those who want to “look beyond enterprise telephony to different ways of working, especially for nomadic and knowledge workers.” I agree entirely. In fact, you read it here first, on UCStrategies.com. We called this out from the beginning, advising readers, clients, and our workshop and VoiceCon attendees to look for breakthrough improvements for the specific users in specific business processes. This is why we have always said that UC is, “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” Just look at the 200 Microsoft case studies for OCS 2007 – some are just simple travel avoidance or international toll cost savings, but many really are new ways to communicate and are real business optimizations.
We’ll bring you more news on this as it unfolds, both here and at NoJitter.com. If you want to know about Unified Communications, and if you want to know how UC will intersect Corporate Telephony, this is the place to be!
Please do add a comment below, so we get a lively dialog on this momentous event.
Great posting Marty, and I agree 100%. The communications industry as a whole is moving toward a sofware based model that offers choice of device, network, location, and communication medium. Microsoft is clearly leading down the path of offering this model to enterprises and carriers alike, while consumers benefit from their clients which operate on countless mobile phones today from Windows Mobile to Blackberry and iPhone. Having a secure, IT managed solution for access to contacts and data while providing a single sign on method for authentication and compliance auditing across Web, Mobile, PC, and telephony IVR acces is where we are headed in this market…and I for one cannot wait to get there.
Excellent perspective on where telephony is going. It’s not that Microsoft wants to take over tradtional business telephony so much, but that voice conversations can become more manageable and part of multi-modal communications. The big driver for this shift? Personalized, mobile “smart phones” which enable end users to exploit the flexibility of UC, while still retaining access to voice conversations more efficiently and selectively through presence and “click-to-talk” efficiency.
In addition to exploiting telephony presence to minimize “blind” calling attempts, I foresee a big change in business communications etiquette and the disappearance of some of the limitations of legacy voice mail and IVR systems for traditional “telephone answering” and business applications. This will apply to both callers (contact initiators) as well as recipients. It will also be reflected by the disappearance of the traditional Telephone user interface (TUI) based on voice output and Touchtone input. Instead ee will have new choices of speech input (which is faster than pushing buttons), and visual output, which is faster and less error prone than listening and trying to remember speech output.
Needless to say, this moves voice conversations into the domain of online interactive applications, which Microsoft and IBM are more experienced with than telephone system experts.
Spot on. Microsoft’s inclusion in the MQ heralds a seismic shift in the nature of the telephony market: a recognition that telephony exists as a means to an end, not an end in itself. That “end” is about enterprises, and their employees, achieving real business goals: connecting with customers, getting product built, making a sale, or getting budgets done. As the pace and nature of collaboration has dramatically evolved over the last decade (witness e-mail, document sharing, portals as powering collaboration), the telephony space must accordingly evolve (or risk obsolescence), and Microsoft’s solution is at the frontier of that evolution in the telephony “industry”.