Getting meetings right: Gartner names Cisco as a Meeting Solutions Leader for fifteenth time

Meetings remain at the center of how people connect and collaborate in today’s business. We’re thrilled that Cisco has again been recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Meeting Solutions for the fifteenth time in a row. In fact —since the inception of the Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions— Webex has never missed being in the Leaders Quadrant.  

Delivering innovation that adds value

We feel that our commitment to innovation and differentiation within the Cisco Webex collaboration portfolio led us to be recognized. At Cisco, we know that applying solutions from 2020 is not going to cut it.  

We are proud that our consistent innovation is adding value and making the lives of our customers even better. This year has seen the highest demand on record for collaboration technology and we’re committed to delivering the innovation that meets their new, hybrid day-to-day collaboration needs.  

We’ve delivered more than 900 of these innovations in the past 9 months and we plan to keep the momentum going.  

• Webex enables open and continuous collaboration by converging meetings, team collaboration, persistent team messaging, and calling capabilities into a single app to improve workflows.
• Earlier this year, we unveiled the Webex Suite, which packs those best-of-breed solutions with amazing additional products and capabilities like async video. It’s all integrated in one comprehensive suite–so there is no need to buy additional tools or solutions.
• We just changed the game with our unmatched speech and audio intelligence technology to now include optimize for my voice which distinguishes between foreground and background talkers.
• Users tell us that Webex Smart Audio background noise removal has helped them tune out the noise and focus on what they do best.
• Our Slido integration in meetings, which gives users access to engaging features like polling, quizzes and real-time Q&A, has also helped to increase participation and take friction out of engaging audiences.
• We’ve added more event capabilities to power virtual and in-person events of any size – from small webinars to large multi-day events. And revamped Webex Events to enable a simple way to deliver even more engaging and interactive virtual experiences for your audiences at scale. The addition of Socio brings rich features including virtual event hubs, ticketing, attendee networking, and more to Webex.
• Features like People Focus has also leveled the playing field between remote workers and on-site workers.
• Our multi-lingual meetings transcribes 13 different languages that can then be translated into 108 languages. By adding live interpreters, we can add human audio interpretation to AI based transcription and translation.
• Our new app integration framework is allowing for deep meaningful integrations with other SaaS applications so that you can do more in your meetings without toggling between apps. And our bi-directional integration framework allows for integrating Webex to other apps seamlessly.
• And just last month, our cloud calling solutions celebrated hosting a record 8 billion calls –the most hosted by a cloud calling provider–across our cloud calling platforms.

Our teams have put in a lot of work to help companies make the transition back into the office and embrace the new hybrid work environment. Our innovation is built from the ground up to solve the real-world challenges of IT, knowledge workers, and those on the frontline. We’ve invested over $2 billion in acquisitions that include the latest AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies and next-generation event experiences to meet these new era demands. 

Making things easier for IT

During the pandemic, IT went from managing a few office buildings to managing thousands of homes. In the hybrid work era, this job has become even harder. Not only is IT still managing thousands of remote workers but now, they also must provide a safe environment for workers that prefer or must return to the office.  

IT not only has to make the conference rooms work well with remote workers but also ensure that those rooms enforce requisite social distancing and monitor in-room attendance. With Webex devices, not only can IT offer compelling experiences like People Focus, they can also monitor room capacity, attendance, and other environmental metrics like temperature, humidity, ambient noise, and air quality.  

Webex Control Hub continues to innovate by providing deeper diagnostics and insights that allows IT to provide the best possible experience to their end users. New capabilities like Live Meetings page allows IT to monitor quality of experience not just for meetings but also for large events.

Addressing industry-specific collaboration needs

Our specialized solutions that address a variety of industry use cases is another reason we feel we maintained our leadership standing in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. Collaborating easily and securely is more important than ever to customers across every industry.

Governments, educators, doctors, and frontline workers alike have specialized collaboration needs. Webex meets them where they work. Whether the job involves treating patients, making laws, or teaching online, Webex has a solution built with industry-specific workflows in mind.

• Webex for Government is a FedRAMP Moderate collaboration solution, that provides a modern experience to government employees on par with commercial Webex solution available to private corporations. It integrates calling, messaging, meetings, devices, and Webex Control Hub management for federal customers.
• Webex for healthcare is purpose-built to meet healthcare delivery needs in diverse care settings. Webex Telehealth Connector allows for the flexibility to launch virtual visits from within clinician workflows or as a stand-alone application in a browser that has access to camera and microphone.
• Webex Legislate, which was built for courts on our open platform using Webex SDK, enables courts and legislators to convene safely and securely, never miss a vote, and take decisive action from anywhere.
• And solutions like Webex Classroom are enabling secure distance and hybrid learning to help students keep learning–whether in the classroom, at home, or somewhere in between.

Always leading the way in security and reliability

One of the things we are most proud of in this report is the recognition of our reliability and strong security. Our mantra has always been to create solutions that are secure by design and private by default. The global federated identity built in to Webex lets users leverage a unified experience so you get great collaboration with zero security compromise, whether you are inside or outside of an organization. This is why over 650 million monthly participants and 95 percent of the Fortune 500 around the world rely on Webex to meet and collaborate securely.

• This year, we introduced the industry’s first standards based zero-trust security in collaboration, which requires verification from everyone before they even try to gain access to resources or data.Zero-Trust Security from Webex provides end-to-end encryption and strong identity verification in your scheduled and personal room meetings.
• We also introduced the industry’s first real-time data loss prevention (DLP) capability, so you can prohibit classified content from ever being sent, rather than redacting or deleting content after it is posted.

These are just a couple of examples of how the built-in security in Webex helps to keep our customers safe. Security has always been part of our DNA and at the forefront of every discussion, design, and strategy at Cisco.

The experts have spoken: Webex is a leader in Meeting Solutions

We’re very proud of our 15-times Leader recognition in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. Our teams will continue to be aggressive about designing and delivering the innovation, technology, scale, and security that empower remote and smart hybrid work experiences – across the collaboration landscape.

You can access the full 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions here.

Learn more

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Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Meeting Solutions, Mike Fasciani, Tom Eagle,  Brian Doherty, Christopher Trueman 7 October 2021.  

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.  

The Gartner document is available upon request from Cisco. 

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.