This week, Gartner® published their 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) report 1, and we’re proud that Cisco was named a Leader for Webex for the fourth consecutive year.
The Gartner report comes at a pivotal moment: UCaaS is seeing rapid adoption and expansion to a complete collaboration platform that’s mission-critical for organizations of all sizes in the new era of hybrid work. For us at Webex, it comes at a time of exceptionally rapid innovation. We released more than 1,000 innovations over the past 18 months to deliver the complete integrated functionality and best-in-class user experience our customers now expect. In fact, we just held our annual WebexOne event where we showcased much of this innovation.
While many vendors have gotten the basics of a UCaaS solution in place, this is no time to consider the job done. On the contrary—the wide adoption and increased dependence on enterprise collaboration call for relentless innovation to continue to add value, remove roadblocks, and improve the experience for both end users and IT administrators.
At Webex, the past year has been one of unprecedented innovation across our portfolio. We believe this Gartner recognition acknowledges our innovation leadership. We continued to deliver differentiated innovations across the entire collaboration portfolio at a rapid pace.
With a broad collaboration portfolio that includes the Webex Suite, Webex Contact Center, and Cisco collaboration devices, we delivered innovation and leveraged synergies across the portfolio:
A key area of innovation has been to extend our AI capabilities throughout the Webex portfolio to deliver new capabilities, optimize workflows, and improve the experience and well-being of users and customers.
Highlights include extended language support for our voice activated Webex Assistant and Audio Intelligence with AI-based noise removal and voice optimization for both individual and multiple speakers. And with increasingly diverse employees and customer communities, inclusivity and broad reach are also extremely important. Key examples include our People Focus feature, which provides inclusive experiences for all hybrid meetings participants, and our extensive language capabilities including captions, transcripts, and real-time time translation into 100+ caption languages:
Innovation in automation and intelligence helps not just end users—it can also greatly facilitate and enhance service administration. As just announced at WebexOne, we introduced Control Hub as a Coach, providing insights and step-by-step guidance for administrators to set, track, and achieve collaboration objectives.
In the world of hybrid work, collaboration platforms have become the central hub where employees and organizations get most of their daily work done. Therefore, they must be comprehensive—fully integrating all UCaaS capabilities as well as devices, contact center, and a wide range of third-party business applications. We believe this Gartner recognition acknowledges the completeness of our solution including both software and hardware, which are developed and integrated in-house.
The Webex Suite provides the most comprehensive integrated collaboration offering—including meetings, calling, messaging, whiteboarding, webinars, events, polling, and asynchronous video. It seamlessly integrates with our full range of Cisco collaboration devices for every workspace: shared spaces in the office, conference rooms, home and while mobile. Our devices include personal and room video devices, phones, headsets, and cameras, providing an optimal end-to-end experience and manageability.
The Webex Suite also integrates with Webex Contact Center to offer a cloud-native multi-channel contact center with leading automation and intelligence capabilities.
Furthermore, all Webex applications leverage our global Webex platform infrastructure that delivers unmatched security, scalability, reliability, and resilience deployed across 47 data centers worldwide.
Here are some highlights of our Webex capabilities working together:
Full collaboration support for mobile and remote users is at the heart of successful hybrid work. All employees must have access to a complete and equal range of collaboration tools, providing optimal productivity and user experience from any location and at any time. In particular, the mobile phone has become a key business communication device and must be fully integrated within enterprise collaboration.
We believe this Gartner recognition acknowledges our leadership in mobile and remote work:
Mobility and remote work have been a key Webex focus area over the past year. We introduced Webex Go, which allows users to make and receive calls using their business phone number on their personal mobile device without the need for a separate app. It provides full access to Webex enterprise-grade calling features while protecting employees’ privacy. With Webex Go, enterprises can cost-effectively deploy secure enterprise calling on mobile phones and manage them centrally via our Webex Control Hub. And as we just announced at WebexOne, by the end of this year, users will be able to seamlessly elevate Webex Go calls to a full Webex meeting at any time.
In addition to Webex Go, there was a wealth of other enhancements in support of mobility and remote work. In partnership with Apple, we have added native support for AirPlay and CarPlay and are leveraging built-in iOS capabilities to enhance mobile user experience with features such as pictute-in-picture on the iPAD. At WebexOne, we have just launched Business Texting using the business phone number that is fully integrated within the Webex app.
And in an industry-first innovation, we introduced Mobile Camera Share, which allows iPhone and iPad users to share live content in the Webex app and annotate over what they’re seeing. Users can write, draw, and add shapes, in real-time and simultaneously with any number of other meeting participants. It enables frontline workers to collaborate more effectively by leveraging the high-quality video capture capabilities of Apple devices. See it in action in this video below:
A key takeaway from Gartner’s 2022 UCaaS Magic Quadrant report is that selecting the right UCaaS platform has become a critical business decision—with significant impacts on productivity, effectiveness, and employee well-being.
Webex provides secure, integrated software and hardware to enable organizations to optimize communications and collaboration and support hybrid work. Webex offers the complete platform organizations need to connect employees and customers to get work done.
I encourage you to read the Gartner full report to learn what they consider key UCaaS priorities and Gartner’s detailed assessment of Webex to help meet your organization’s collaboration needs.
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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.
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