Avaya announced that it has been rated as a Leader in the 2017 IDC MarketScape Worldwide Unified Communications and Collaboration Vendor Assessment[1]. Avaya was rated as a leader following an evaluation of capabilities and strategies of 11 vendors that offer unified communications and collaborations technologies globally.
In the report, IDC identified three major trends occurring with the deployment of the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) technologies: Expansion of the market to $33.8 billion in 2017; increase in the number of businesses using UC&C to 37%; and the solidifying of cloud’s role as the leading delivery model, although businesses continue to invest in premises-based systems.
The analyst firm offers advice to companies looking to implement, change or expand their UC&C environment, such as considering:
– the entire range of UC&C product or services offerings that the vendor provides or enables, including all deployment options: hybrid/public/private cloud; managed services, on premises
– a vendor/partner/service provider with a proven track record of customer UC&C deployments (whether on-premises or in the cloud) as well as demonstrable professional services expertise
– a UC&C vendor with a large or growing ecosystem of application development partners, plus access to APIs to integrate communications and collaboration with business processes and applications
– the ability of vendors to introduce new applications should factor heavily into all your future infrastructure decisions without major changes to the current infrastructure
– the potential integration between UC&C technologies and contact center technologies, and the use of video, social and data analytics in the contact center
In the past year, Avaya has advanced its Team Engagement portfolio of unified communications and collaboration technologies as well as its Customer Engagement portfolio of contact center solutions. The launch of Avaya Equinox for Team Engagement, Avaya Oceana for Customer Engagement, the creation of and additions to Zang, and continued progress on Avaya Breeze enable an open platform upon which to build solutions and the ability to integrate with critical existing infrastructure and applications, supporting services and applications. Through Avaya Breeze and the extensive, Avaya DevConnect community of developers, companies have the ability to easily create, develop and integrate communications capabilities with business processes and applications.
Avaya and its channel partners offers a number of deployment options, including hybrid, private and public cloud, managed services and on-premises for both enterprise and midsize businesses.
“As the UC&C market continues to grow, companies are seeing both the successes and pitfalls that come with the evolution of technologies. Those that invested in point products with limited capabilities may find it difficult to integrate or expand them into a more cohesive, multi-functional solution. Avaya continues to take the long view, offering the flexibility to enable companies to leverage their existing investments while adopting new capabilities−via hybrid or pure cloud–that support a more comprehensive digital strategy.” Gary E. Barnett, SVP and GM, Engagement Solutions, Avaya