Cisco Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions 2018

I am pleased to announce that Cisco was again named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions 2018. The report evaluates meeting solutions from multiple vendors in the market. Cisco products placed highest in the ability to execute and in completeness of vision.

Gartner’s assessment is important as it can help you evaluate vendors with the best meeting options. It’s an honor to be placed in the highest position for both categories. And Gartner’s insight aligns with what we see in our customer activity:

More people use Webex Meetings than all other vendors combined. Same with our video devices.*

Cisco Webex hosts more than 6 billion meeting minutes every month.

Cisco holds the #1 market share position for on-premises meeting solutions.*

Our customers enable us to maintain our leadership position. The power of our existing user base provides us with unparalleled insight to constantly evolve our products to better meet user and business needs.

Gartner calls out three strengths in this year’s report.** These are key to why people choose Cisco, whether in the cloud with Cisco Webex or on-premises with Cisco Meetings Server.

Strength: Range of Features

We pride ourselves helping modern enterprises to innovate by empowering their global workforces to achieve their full potential. I am quite honored that we are not only believers in diversity at Cisco, but that we are enabling workforce diversity through our collaboration technology. It gives me chills each day when new ideas come to life through the diversity of thought and geography that only our tools can enable.

We are focused on removing friction from every part of your meeting experience. Meetings are the canvas for continuous innovation. We are innovating to create easy join experiences, consistency across devices (video devices, desktops, browsers, mobile devices, and beyond), high-quality in-meeting experiences, more personal meetings, and meetings integrate into your workflows so you can be more efficient. And the list goes on.

Some details of these efforts include:

A consistent one-button-to-push experience to ease joining meetings from any entry point for cloud and premises-based meetings. These entry points include our video devices (cloud and on-premises connected), desktop and mobile devices, browsers, and beyond. Even guests have one button to push to join a meeting – no downloads or plugs-in are required.

We introduced our biggest redesign of Cisco Webex Meetings this year, focusing on simpler, more modern video meetings that maximize engagement for everyone – on any device. Our mobile experiences are second to none. Our partnership with Apple plays a big part in enhancing these experiences.

More choice and efficiency in your workday. Cisco Webex is an open platform. We are working to provide choice by integrating our meetings into business processes, productivity suites, and even other collaboration products, including but not limited to Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Slack (more details here). Our rich SDKs allow our partners to further tailor our offerings to your needs. We truly are just getting started on our promise to integrate our meetings wherever you work.

We added 1000+ features this year, all designed to help people engage in and enjoy meetings more. Gartner highlights two of my favorite features that do just that:

Intelligent Speaker Tracking: A typical video device captures the whole meeting room, but Cisco video devices automatically keep the active speaker in full view to help remote attendees stay engaged. The system also tracks presenters, following them as they stand and move around the room.

Natural language speech commands: Using AI, we introduced world’s first enterprise-ready voice assistant designed for meetings. Voice commands start and join meetings. While still in its infancy, the assistant will bring great promise to the future of work, helping you offload tasks and be more productive.

Strength: Customer Opinion

Our customers report that consistency and reliability are some of the biggest reasons they choose to use Webex. We believe they are responding to us having the strongest video backbone out there. Cisco Webex is the only cloud service with a worldwide backbone especially built and optimized for real-time media. We engineered our service to deliver superior quality, reliability, and security beyond what’s possible on the public internet or in other non-real time cloud-based networks. Our backbone minimizes the time you spend on the public Internet by allowing you to automatically join meetings via the closest Webex data center. And we are continuously enhancing these capabilities.

We are constantly learning from our user base. Analytics help us maintain our reliability for everyone from the administrator to the end user. The same information enables our partners to serve our customers smarter and better. With the addition of machine learning and AI within our cloud services, we are and will be even more proactive going forward. We are invested in making sure every user has a phenomenal experience. We will not rest on our laurels.

Strength: Channel Ecosystem

Our distribution channel and support systems are second to none. In addition to our modern support systems and world-class field teams, we have thousands of partners in almost every country to ensure the best local support from pre-sales to delivery through adoption and beyond. We’ve built our partner program on value vs. volume. This allows our partners to deliver the most robust solutions and services regardless of their size or location. This means that we can scale to support more types of customers and better support innovation for the workplace of the future. And this expertise is critical for the largest and most complex meeting solutions.

If you are evaluating meeting vendors, you are surely seeing the gap widening between offers. Meetings are changing. Video is pervasive. You need a vendor that can do more than just keep up with your needs but can keep you ahead. Cisco provides:

Simple, consistent, modern experiences across the entire meeting lifecycle whether hosted on-premises or in the cloud

Industry-leading security and scale to bring peace of mind and flexibility to support meetings whether just a few people or tens of thousands

Flexibility with the broadest range of meeting solutions and devices to help you evolve seamlessly as your users’ needs change

We believe that the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report validates our mission to deliver that consistent and amazing experience now and in the future. Global reach is key today. Global workforce enablement and diversity of thought are critical for businesses to succeed. We are the enablers!

Try Webex for yourself. Go to webex.com to sign up for a free trial.

Want to see the full report? Get a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

* Synergy Research, May 2018: Telepresence worldwide infrastructure.

** Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions 2018 by Mike Fasciani, Adam Preset, Tom Eagle, September 2018.

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.