All New: Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions

Gartner Inc., the world’s largest research and advisory firm providing information technology related insight for IT and other business leaders, recently released their all new 2017 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions.

Meeting solutions blend communications, collaboration and content to enable real-time group work from anywhere at any time. This Magic Quadrant report, along with its partner Critical Capabilities research, can help application leaders in pursuing digital workplace initiatives find solution vendors best fitted to their needs.

Gartner defines meeting solutions as real-time collaboration tools that support interactions over a network between participants for team work, presentations, training and webinars. Enterprise offerings in this market perform equally well for workers in meeting spaces, at their desks or when mobile, integrated with voice, video, messaging and content sharing.

Key Takeaways

Some meeting solution vendors segment their product lines to target and scale to one of several of those use cases, while others offer broad solutions that work for each purpose.

According to the report, organizations with complex needs will have separate meeting solutions for internal use (for collaboration, learning and internal communication) and for external use (for sales or marketing).

Application leaders deploy meeting solutions in the digital workplace to:

• Enhance face-to-face meeting activities (for example, with content sharing)
• Reduce geographic barriers for organizational communication
• Save time and money by minimizing business travel
• Train remote participants in multiple locations

Gartner researched and analyzed a total of 14 vendors for the Magic Quadrant report: Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, Google, West, Adobe, Polycom, LogMeIn, Vidyo, BlueJeans Network, PGI, Arkadin, Huawei and ZTE.

Each vendor is evaluated based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. They are then placed on the Magic Quadrant graphic composed of four categories: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players.

Leaders provide mature offerings that meet market demand and Challengers have a strong ability to execute but may not have a plan that will maintain a strong value proposition for new customers. Visionaries align with Gartner’s view of how a market will evolve, but have fewer proven capabilities to deliver against that vision, and Niche Players do well in a particular segment of a market, but have a limited capability to innovate or outperform others.

The report also provides an entire meeting solutions market overview in depth for those still learning about it.

Read the 2017 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions.

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