Cisco Scores Highest in Gartner 2019 Critical Capabilities Report in Three Meetings Use Cases

“Wood Behind the Arrow” of the Magic Quadrant – Insights to Gartner’s 2019 Critical Capabilities for Meeting Solutions Report

Gartner recently published the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions report and Cisco placed highest for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision. But the proof is in the pudding, right? Well, here’s the pudding: The Gartner 2019 Critical Capabilities for Meeting Solutions¹report is “wood behind the arrow” of the Magic Quadrant and provides additional insights into the scores of meeting solutions in various meetings use cases. Cisco Webex received the highest scores for Internal Collaboration, Learning and Training, and Webinars. In the final use case, External Presentations, Cisco scored second highest.

Here’s my take on some of the highlights in the report:

Internal Collaboration

For effective internal collaboration, an enterprise-grade, highly-scalable, available, and secure, collaboration platform is key. Our customers have depended on Webex for best-in-class video, audio, and content sharing capabilities for teams of all sizes that also give them the flexibility to participate wherever they are and on any device. We believe our Internal Collaboration use case score of 4.55 from the Gartner Critical Capabilities report is validation that we are continuing to deliver what our customers need to collaborate effectively among teams and colleagues. And we are always working to improve and evolve experiences across our entire portfolio. All of our Webex solutions improvements and features including Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, Webex Calling, Messaging, and Webex Devices are inspired by how you and your team collaborate, with functionality that lets you focus on the people and content that matter the most.

Learning and Training Anywhere, Anytime on Any Device

We’ve long invested in making Webex a powerful learning and training platform. Designed for the task, Cisco Webex Training is a dynamic, interactive e-learning environment that engages audience participation. We’ve also been working on making our solutions more accessible and flexible to help educators reach more students in different ways. Our Connected Classroom provides the ability to learn anywhere, anytime, and on any device with Cisco Webex, Cisco video devices, and Learning Management System (LMS) integrations like Blackboard, Canvas, D2L, Moodle, and Sakai. And solutions like Virtual Classroom help to facilitate lessons and discussions using Webex and Cisco video devices, like the Cisco Webex Board Series and the Cisco Webex Room Series. We know in this digital-everything world, classroom collaboration isn’t bound by geographies anymore so we are working hard to deliver highly effective, online learning wherever and whenever it’s needed – without sacrificing effectiveness.

External Presentation

We believe, External Presentation is a highly competitive use case. Cisco’s own criteria in developing a conferencing product that gives users rich capabilities for presenting to external audiences include the following, which many customers have favored:

Reach— Webex users have a choice of how they join (no forced download or browser choice). Particularly, for users that prefer the lightweight in-browser experience (no app download), they love our WebRTC support in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Security — Our priority is not to compromise customers’ security postures in lieu of forcing an app download and saving a second or so on join time. This has been appreciated by our enterprise customers, particularly as they rely on us for external B2B and high-value meetings.
Quality Hardware and Software — Presenting externally – to customers, prospects and external parties – require a business-quality presence, which oftentimes means needing to extend the experience beyond laptops to purpose-built video devices. Webex Meetings + Webex Devices is still the market leading and unmatched choice for customers that have an external audience.
Utility — We have also innovated on what’s useful to people beyond audio, video, and screen share. For external presentation in particular, one challenge is the lack of familiarity with the participants you are going to meet with. Webex People Insights provides dynamic relationship intelligence about the people you meet with, which means you can show up better prepared and have that intelligence available at your fingertips even during the meeting.

Webinars

Webex Events is one of the key differentiators of the Webex platform, supporting up to 3,000 people, to help you stage high-quality online events. We are quite proud of the 4.7 score in this category. Over the past year, we’ve done much to bring more sophisticated capabilities to support large events and webinars, including enabling up to 200 video devices to call into Webex Events and support for People Insights – already available on our Meetings platform – so you can have more information about the people presenting to you in a webinar or event. This Cognitive Collaboration feature integrates relationship intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and business process capabilities across the Webex portfolio. But we’re not stopping there. We’re working on additional intelligence features including actionable transcription to help our users increase efficiency, productivity, and the team experience.

What’s Next?

I’m really proud of what we’ve delivered in the new Webex and our placement in Gartner’s 2019 Critical Capabilities report, but we’re not resting on our laurels. We know that meetings and collaboration are the lifeblood that moves work forward, so we’re always thinking about how we can deliver the best possible experience, no matter how or where you meet.

Be sure to check out the Critical Capabilities for Meeting Solutions report, where you can get the details behind Gartner’s 2019 evaluation.

Learn More:

¹This 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, Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions, 5 September 2019, Mike Fasciani, Tom Eagle, Adam Preset
*Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Meeting Solutions, 8 October 2019, Tom Eagle, Adam Preset, Mike Fasciani

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, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Note, the report was Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing from 2005 – 2016. In 2017 it was renamed to Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions

Collaboration