Yesterday Gartner released the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, and to no surprise for the most part, the results are what's expected. Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel all made the top right quadrant, along with the surprising Phoenix like, Avaya, while Unify popped up in the visionary category.
As GetVoIP explained on March 30th of this year, there's a big difference between the two MQ's from Gartner. The two different grids and reports separate out UC and UCaaS. The latter report is where the emerging cloud players like RingCentral, 8×8, Dialpad, Vonage and soon Google will all be considered for. That report comes out in a few months, just before Gartner's big fall shindig in Orlando, ITXpo.
In reality, it would be best if Gartner released both reports simultaneously, as there's the initial "hype" cycle as we're seeing already from Avaya in the media, and Mitel as well, that tends to cause buyers who are shopping for UCaaS to say "but I don't see you in the Gartner UC report" to companies who are selling the cloud first offerings.
What's the difference? The UC is more of a premise based solution set that offers access to the cloud services. The UCaaS offerings start in the cloud, as a cloud service, are far more oriented for the mobile workforce, and tend to be more nimble in delivering new service solutions and features. Governments and the very large scale enterprise are likely better suited for UC type solutions today, while the more rapidly growing companies with nationwide or global footprints are more suited for UCaaS . In the future, UCaaS will be the bigger market, but for now, UC is the big dog in the yard, and that's why Gartner shares those details now.