Most people who purchase or implement enterprise business solutions are familiar with analyst group Gartner's (News - Alert) “Magic Quadrant.” By graphing a solution's capabilities and strengths onto an “x” and “y” axis, Gartner produces an at-a-glace summation of the solutions on the market in any particular vertical area: for example, CRM, workforce management, customer experience management.

The goal of the Magic Quadrant is to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. All companies plotted fall into one of four categories: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players.

So what does it mean when a Magic Quadrant is created that has no players in the “Leaders” quadrant?

It means that market is vastly underserved and lacks a full-featured, highly functional, all-encompassing solution.

And so it is with unified communications-as-a-service (UcaaS), or unified communications capabilities delivered via the cloud. Gartner's newly released UCaaS Magic Quadrant contains Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players, but no leaders. That leaves us left to look to, and root for, the Challengers, or those most likely to become Leaders in the future.

According to SearchUnifiedCommunications, the large tech vendors and service providers identified as Challengers in the recently released UCaaS Magic Quadrant will likely introduce stronger UCaaS solutions in 2012, says Bern Elliot, VP and research analyst at Gartner. Bern says a strong opportunity now exists for both established vendors and niche vendors to develop UCaaS solutions suitable for large organizations.

Following are the companies that were plotted on the Magic Quadrant, and the categories they were put into:

Challengers:
Microsoft (News - Alert) and its Lync Online UCaaS
Verizon
Google
AT&T
West

Niche Players:
Siemens Enterprise Communications
British Telecom

Visionaries:
Thinking Phone Networks
Cypress Communications (News - Alert)
PanTerra Networks
M5 Networks

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO, click here.

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