The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q2 2014

Transcription

1 For: Infrastructure & Operations Professionals The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q by Christopher Voce and Art Schoeller, June 26, 2014 Key Takeaways System Owners Will Need To Work With Users To Identify Needs And Drive Adoption Leading vendors offer compelling UC&C user experiences. Forward-thinking buyers must deploy UC&C solutions that their users will adopt and use. Engaging communications-enabled collaboration experiences allow employees to innovate and serve customers better. UC&C Vendors Must Deliver Solutions That Impact The Business With Low TCO Tech management and business decision-makers are feeling the heat -- they must deliver improved business performance. Wise buyers will check references and insist on a UC&C business case that impacts core business results and infrastructure savings. Open Standard Interoperability Is A Key Differentiator Buyers favor vendors that advocate for new standards and uniform adoption of existing standards. Fueling innovation within the ecosystem via developers and driving new standards to market via the standards bodies is a key strategic and tactical advantage in delivering useful solutions. Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA USA Tel: Fax:

2 June 26, 2014 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Christopher Voce and Art Schoeller with Henry Dewing, and Michael Caputo Why Read This Report In Forrester s 29-criteria evaluation of enterprise on-premises unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions vendors, we identified the 11 most significant providers Aastra Technologies (acquired by Mitel in January 2014), Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, Mitel Networks, NEC, ShoreTel, and Siemens (rebranded Unify in October 2013) in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals with telecom and networking responsibility select the right partner for their UC&C solutions. Table Of Contents Open UC&C Solutions Help Fuel Business Innovation The UC&C Solutions Market Has Matured Enterprise On-Premises UC&C Evaluation Overview Vendor Evaluation Structure The UC&C Market Is Consolidating Around Full- Featured Solutions Clear Linkages To Business Value Differentiate Market Leaders Vendor Profiles Leaders Strong Performers Contenders Notes & Resources Forrester conducted lab-based evaluations and interviewed over 50 vendor and user companies, including Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, Mitel Networks, NEC, ShoreTel, and Unify. Related Research Documents Five Trends To Help You Enable Collaboration In Context May 21, 2014 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War July 25, 2013 Avoid Tactical, Narrow Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Strategies January 18, Supplemental Material 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to

3 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Open Uc&C Solutions Help Fuel Business Innovation Many technology management buyers today are challenged by executive staff to help increase innovation, and one of their options is to supply better tools to improve collaboration. Simply buying a few licenses of whatever collaboration software is on the shelf at your local reseller won t satisfy the mandate real process design and application integration are required. Information workers are hungry to make a difference if the current set of enterprise UC&C solutions do not meet their needs, they can easily access tools like Microsoft s Skype or Google Hangouts to connect with their peers or external partners. The role of the technology buyer is to bring all these capabilities under control in a consistent architecture so the firm can communicate, collaborate, and innovate in a safe, secure, compliant, and reliable environment. The UC&C Solutions Market Has Matured Just a few years ago, I&O buyers struggled to draw boundaries around what a UC&C solution encompassed, opting for definitions like a multimodal communication system enabling point-topoint and group collaboration using voice, IM, , and video in the context of presence, identity, and availability features to streamline business processes by reducing the human latency inherent in business communications. UC&C is now standardized, with nearly half of firms implementing or expanding their capabilities (see Figure 1). Integrating UC&C functions and capabilities into business applications and processes will ensure that information workers and business decisionmakers can achieve the values that support the case to buy UC&C. Three key developments are shaping today s UC&C investments: UC&C increasingly supports integration with applications and social networking. To drive increased adoption, UC&C functions increasingly need to simply be a click away from the software environment (such as customer relationship management [CRM]) that users spend their time in. Business decision-makers must consider whether they want vendors that can deliver innovation via open collaboration platforms that connect to other business process applications and social interactions or an integrated solution from a single vendor or service provider. IT buyers are faced with some vendors offering open interoperability, while others focus on delivering a complete suite of capabilities. Some vendors offer applications/softwarecentric deployment models, while others offer network switching/hardware-centric models. The IT buyer role is evolving. Tech management professionals can no longer sit back and design architecture and build an infrastructure based solely on their own analysis. Engaging with business units today drives deeper understanding of process integration and key success metrics. Many tech management professionals report learning about interest in capabilities like desktop video by the adoption of solutions like FaceTime, or the value of social applications by discussing the lead generation process with sales team members. Understanding future trends is critical for successful architecture design, but building a flexible open infrastructure to enable business units to adopt and tune their solutions will drive greater acceptance, adoption, and value.

4 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q UC deployments are moving to the cloud. The majority of buyers of network and telecom equipment and services today choose on-premises UC&C solutions and manage it themselves or contract a managed service provider to operate their solution. Looking to the future, though, about 29% of these buyers intend to use some form of hosted or cloud-based delivery model. 1 All of the major vendors in this report are developing and delivering cloud-based solutions as well a wise buyer will review the architecture and go-to-market plans of vendors related to cloud and hybrid deployments before settling on a solution. Figure 1 Unified Communications Adoption Continues To Expand At what stage is your firm in adopting the following features of unified communications? (4 or 5 on a scale of 1 [not interested] to 5 [already implemented]) IP telephony (local-area network VoIP) 98% Videoconferencing Integration with collaboration software Integrated voic with (e.g., unified messaging) Integrated IP conferencing capability Presence (allows others to see other users status) Call control from the user s device like a PC Support for HTML5 Integration with business applications like ERP and CRM 95% 88% 86% 85% 84% 80% 70% 69% Base: 171 NA network and telecom technology management decision-makers who are piloting or have implemented UC solutions from companies with 1,000+ employees Note: Not all responses shown Source: Business Technographics Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

5 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Enterprise On-Premises Uc&C Evaluation Overview To assess the state of the enterprise on-premises unified communications and collaboration market and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top vendors. To be considered, vendors need to be able to deliver a full set of UC&C capabilities voice, IM, video, and for point-to-point and multipoint communications and collaboration in the context of presence, availability, and identity from 50 to 5,000 user deployments. Buyers are anxious to reduce the cost and risks associated with deploying UC&C capabilities and to derive benefits to increase productivity, improve innovation, and enable the adoption/integration of future new technologies. Based on these needs, we focused on: Adoption of open standards. To reduce risks and leave the door open for adoption/integration of future technologies, buyers seek the use and advancement of open standards. Integration capabilities. UC&C buyers and users don t live in a heterogeneous world, so they need their vendors to interoperate with other UC&C vendors and a wide variety of business applications value is derived from improving process results and revenue, not by installing cheaper, faster UC alone. Total cost of ownership and time-to-deploy. UC&C capabilities are critical to business operations, so technology management pros want the deployments to be smooth and costefficient. We asked vendors and some of their reference accounts how long it takes from choosing a vendor to turning on services, as well as what the cost of their deployment is. Future solution innovation. Being able to incorporate new standards, capabilities, and functions from social networking to web clients like WebRTC to efficient protocols like H.265 gives buyers the assurance that the vendor will grow and mature with the market, so future capabilities and plans were taken into consideration as well. Vendor stability. Buyers want to know that their UC&C vendors will be with them for the long haul, so we took a look at total revenue as well as growth, profitability, channel maturity, and global geographic coverage to evaluate each vendor s market presence. Vendor Evaluation Structure After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 29 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets: Current offering. The total time-to-deploy for small, medium, and large installations was a key concern in this category for systems owners. To extend the collaboration platform to meet more business needs, we also evaluated the vendors support of a wide range of standards and the breadth of their developer programs and community. In addition, we evaluated

6 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q proven integration capabilities across nine areas ranging from mobility, IP phones, and other session managers to business and collaboration applications. Finally, we evaluated the vendors perceived quality of experience and ability to deploy in virtualized architectures. Strategy. Looking forward, we evaluated vendor road map plans to utilize new concepts and deliver new functionalities calling out social workloads in particular. We evaluated each vendor s pricing by looking at the three-year TCO of small, medium, and large deployments. Another key measure of strategy was the vendors commitment to and participation in the standards setting process and creation of useful software development kits (SDKs) for their development partners. Finally, we evaluated their ability to deliver into developing cloud and hybrid architectures. Market presence. To evaluate the vendors market presence, we considered the maturity of their channel structure, looking at the types and geographic distribution of these partners. We also looked at the financial stability of the vendor in terms of total UC&C revenue, growth, and profitability. The UC&C Market Is Consolidating Around Full-Featured Solutions Forrester included 11 vendors in the assessment, including Aastra Technologies (acquired by Mitel Networks in January 2014), Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, Mitel Networks, NEC, ShoreTel, and Unify. Each of these vendors has (see Figure 2): Basic communications capabilities. The vendor or a tightly integrated partner delivers capabilities that enable you to connect point-to-point for IM, voice, , and video communications. Collaboration capabilities. The vendor or a tightly integrated partner delivers capabilities that enable you to connect multipoint for IM, voice, webconferencing, and video communications. Communications context. Users must be able to access the above-referenced communications and collaboration capabilities in the context of presence, availability, and identity within the organization. Scope and scale of offer: Vendors must provide a solution for small (50-user), medium (500- user), and large (5,000-user) deployments globally.

7 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Figure 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information Product name Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Business Edition Release 1.3 Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.2 Cisco Unified Communications Manager v.10.0 Huawei U2980 IP PBX IBM Sametime 9.0 Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Mitel (MiVoice) Mitel (MX-One 5.0) NEC Univerge 3C 8.5 ShoreTel ShoreTel 14.2 Unify OpenScape UC v7 GA release date GA October 2013 GA December 2012 GA January 2014 GA December 2012 GA September 2013 GA January 2013 GA November 2013 GA March 2013 GA August 2013 GA January 2014 GA August Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Clear Linkages To Business Value Differentiate Market Leaders The evaluation uncovered a market in which (see Figure 3): Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, and Unify lead the pack. These vendors collectively had better programs for developers to extend their platforms to meet a broad swath of business needs delivering real business value like increased revenues, reduced cycle times, and improved customer satisfaction. These vendors took care of not just their developers, users, and channel partners, but also the UC&C systems owners delivering robust tech management capabilities as well as tools to understand usage of the solutions. They also delivered robust, engaging user experiences to drive adoption and utilization of the solutions. Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, IBM, NEC, and ShoreTel offer competitive options. These vendors delivered solutions that enable replacement and extension of traditional telephony and conferencing capabilities with a unified solution that balances text, visual, and voice communications in the context of presence and availability. These vendors satisfied buyer needs for lower total cost of ownership and reduced deployment times.

8 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Mitel is a Contender. During the period of Forrester s evaluation, Mitel acquired Aastra and its heritage MX-One platform. These vendors generally had less complete ability to integrate with other IP endpoints and session initiation protocol (SIP) session managers. While there were some certified business vertical solutions, these vendors frequently did not provide positive results linking UC&C deployments to recognized business value. This evaluation of the UC&C solutions market is intended to be a starting point only. We encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool. Figure 3 Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q2 14 Strong Risky Strong Bets Contenders Performers Leaders Current offering Mitel (MX-One) NEC Cisco IBM ShoreTel Huawei Mitel (MiVoice) Microsoft Avaya Unify Alcatel- Lucent Go to Forrester.com to download the Forrester Wave tool for more detailed product evaluations, feature comparisons, and customizable rankings. Market presence Weak Weak Strategy Strong Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

9 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Figure 3 Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q2 14 (Cont.) Forrester s Weighting Mitel (MX-One) Alcatel-Lucent Avaya Cisco Huawei IBM Microsoft Mitel (MiVoice) NEC ShoreTel Unify CURRENT OFFERING Speed of deployment Extensibility Integration Quality of experience Client/server deployment options STRATEGY Enterprise social workloads Product road map TCO Extensibility Deployment model MARKET PRESENCE Channel maturity Financial revenue growth Customer diversity 50% 25% 20% 30% 15% 10% 50% 15% 25% 20% 25% 15% 0% 25% 50% 25% All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong) Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Vendor Profiles Leaders Microsoft. The Microsoft Lync client can access the range of communication and collaboration capabilities from tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktop computers running a wide variety of operating systems. Microsoft s single familiar user interface drives rapid adoption and utilization of its solution by information workers. The single integrated package of communications and conferencing capabilities delivered by the Lync client/server infrastructure in a web/xml paradigm makes it easy for developers to customize and build applications to complement Microsoft s UC&C capabilities with industry- and role-specific capabilities from contact center to enterprise resource planning. Avaya. With years of telecommunications experience, Avaya clearly delivers reliable and secure UC&C solutions. Avaya delivers the Avaya Aura Communication Manager, leveraging virtualizable infrastructure to tune investment, capacity, and capabilities to unique system owner

10 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q needs. Avaya also has invested in tools to reduce the time required to deploy and configure UC deployments. Finally, Avaya Labs continues to innovate in areas from communications endpoints to media storage and search, delivering meaningful innovation in this market. Unify. Unify is innovating around social layer integrations and integrating business processes, making it easier to derive business value from an OpenScape deployment. Its ability to deliver industry solutions today and the promise of engaging, socially connected, communicationsenabled collaboration experiences in the near future moves it into the Leaders quadrant. Integration with other cloud solutions, like Google Apps, and a robust stable of mobile- and web-based clients to access OpenScape capabilities puts the solution at the fingertips of information workers, but fragmented user interfaces (UIs) may make them hesitate before being able to drive business processes forward using the solutions. Cisco. After entering the communications market with the acquisition of Selsius Systems in 1998, Cisco has built share and added capabilities, consistently innovating and expanding its offering both organically and via acquisition. Cisco s focus on collaboration tools enables workers to easily connect between different media including voice, video, and webconferencing to deliver a more unified user experience. Cisco s strategy to optimize and standardize Jabber experiences across all users will drive more rapid adoption by end users, while its Cisco UC Prime management capabilities lead the market in satisfying IT system owners need to manage and monitor their UC deployments. Strong Performers IBM. By focusing on open APIs and SDKs, IBM has created an effective way to combine bestof-breed functionalities from a broad portfolio of partners to deliver flexible UC&C capabilities. In addition, IBM delivers IBM Connections, a social layer that has staked IBM s claim to deliver UC&C capabilities integrated into the daily work processes of information workers. Sametime 7 has greatly enhanced IBM s ability to offer integrated conferencing experiences and point-to-point communications directly from the Sametime client, enabling information workers to experience communications-enabled collaboration from a familiar UI on their desktop and mobile device. Alcatel-Lucent. Leveraging a rich heritage of communications capabilities, Alcatel-Lucent is launching the ability to manage conversations before, during, and after meetings that will empower information workers to collaborate and innovate easily and effectively. Alcatel- Lucent has also worked hard to integrate business processes and generate business value with industry vertical solutions for healthcare, education, and finance as well as horizontal solutions for collaboration and innovation. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent has optimized the ability to pick up and transfer calls from one device to another, easing the burden on collaborating employees who use its solution.

11 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q ShoreTel. ShoreTel s commitment to delivering brilliantly simple UC&C solutions shines through in the way that its solutions are deployed by systems owners and used by information workers. ShoreTel led the group of Strong Performers in delivering an engaging quality of experience, encouraging users to take advantage of unified communications capabilities. Low barriers to acquisition, deployment, and use place ShoreTel on the shortlist for consideration by businesses and channels that want rapidly delivered, high-value, tightly integrated, robust UC&C capabilities. Huawei. Huawei has delivered UC&C capabilities to customers, often providing installation and configuration services directly. Huawei s success with some of its largest customers, like ICBC Credit Suisse and Changchun Railway Vehicles, demonstrates the business value delivered by its UC&C solution. For customers that have or are planning to use Huawei equipment and services in other areas of their business, the Huawei UC&C portfolio is an easy choice that enhances the ease of deployment and operation. NEC. NEC s long history of innovation in the communications industry is clearly displayed in its solutions for industries like healthcare and hospitality. Its communications and collaborations infrastructure is built around the time-tested Univerge 3C platform, which delivers reliable, stable communications capabilities. Contenders Mitel. Mitel delivers solid communications capabilities across its product portfolio. Mitel is committed to working with its customers to create and deliver solutions to its existing communications and collaboration needs. Mitel s MiCollab client and Mitel Applications Suite deliver a smooth, engaging user experience on laptops and PCs within an office environment and extend most functionality to mobile environments as well, but its TCO trailed others in this evaluation. Mitel (MX-One). During the period of Forrester s evaluation, Mitel acquired Aastra and its heritage MX-One platform. Over the years, the solution has improved, incorporating videoenabled connections to IM/presence from third parties that deliver reliable and consistent access for iworkers. Aastra had lagged behind the other vendors in participating in the standards setting process and the geographic availability of its solution and services. Supplemental Material Online Resource The online version of Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings.

12 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave Forrester used a combination of data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each solution: Vendor interviews. Forrester interviewed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation criteria. Once we analyzed the vendor responses, we verified with customer references and vendor follow-up calls. Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their product s functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor s product capabilities. We evaluated each product using the same scenarios, creating a level playing field by evaluating every product on the same criteria. Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with up to three of each vendor s current customers. The Forrester Wave Methodology We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated in this market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose these vendors based on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate vendors that have limited customer references and products that don t fit the scope of our evaluation. After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria, we gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires, demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review, and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies. We set default weightings to reflect our analysis of the needs of large user companies and/or other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document and then score the vendors based on a clearly defined scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based tool. The final scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering, strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every Forrester Wave follows, go to

13 The Forrester Wave : On-Premises Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q Survey Methodology Forrester s Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2013, was fielded to 2,487 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US from SMB and enterprise companies with two or more employees. This survey is part of Forrester s Forrsights for Business Technology and was fielded from January 2013 to March ResearchNow fielded this survey online on behalf of Forrester. Survey respondent incentives include points redeemable for gift certificates. We have provided exact sample sizes in this report on a question-by-question basis. Forrester s Business Technographics provides demand-side insight into the priorities, investments, and customer journeys of business and technology decision-makers and the workforce across the globe. Forrester collects data insights from qualified respondents in 10 countries spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Business Technographics uses only superior data sources and advanced data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality. Integrity Policy All of Forrester s research, including Waves, is conducted according to our Integrity Policy. For more information, go to Endnotes 1 Base: 648 North American and European network and telecom decision-makers. Source: Forrester s Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q

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