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Debate rages on Gartner’s corporate telephony magic quadrant

By Bo Gowan August 19, 2008 12:16 pm EDT

Strolling around the web yesterday and this morning, it was hard to miss the coverage and discussion around Gartner’s release of its new Corporate Telephony Magic Quadrant (note that this report is separate from their unified comms MQ).

So far, most of the conversation has been around the appropriateness of Microsoft’s positioning — and even inclusion — in the MQ.  Eric Krapf and others at No Jitter have a running conversation going on this topic, including a link to the actual Gartner MQ report (apparently thanks to an Avaya purchase of the MQ for distribution purposes).

Interestingly, while much of the debate on No Jitter centers on Microsoft’s ranking as a “Visionary”, Microsoft isn’t even ranked highest on the “completeness of vision” scale — Nortel is.

Marty Parker of UC Strategies is a regular contributor to No Jitter, and started the entire debate with this post last week highlighting Microsoft’s inclusion in the Gartner MQ report.  Marty provides a nice piece of insight with the following:

“So long as Microsoft is not “necessarily a replacement” but is “a viable extension of” the PBX or IP PBX, Microsoft will focus their attention on finding new and different ways to add business value. In fact, most of the 200 OCS 2007 case studies on the Microsoft website show some version of applying communications in new ways, rather than as a replacement for a PBX or IP PBX.”

To that point, the Gartner MQ provides some analysis of Nortel in its report (which places Nortel in the “Leaders” quadrant), including the following Nortel advantage:

“ICA [Nortel’s UC alliance with Microsoft] has delivered the best level of Microsoft integration among the telephony vendors. ICA provides more interoperability with less complexity (vs. competitor integrations) between Nortel platforms, such as CS 1000 and CS 2100, and Microsoft OCS 2007.”

So what’s the takeaway here?  If you are evaluating Microsoft OCS as part of the future of your corporate telephony/UC infrastructure (and as Eric Krapf says, “only the willfully blind” are not), then it looks to make a lot of sense to evaluate Nortel as well — the company rated by Gartner in the Leaders quadrant, with the highest “completeness of vision” and with the best integration with Microsoft OCS.

What do you think?  Did Gartner get their rankings right?  Where would you place the vendors?

Categories: Enterprise, Industry News, VoIP / Unified Communictions
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  1. […] couldn’t help but notice Mr. Bo Gowan’s post yesterday regarding Gartner’s magic quadrant for corporate telephony. In his post, he notes […]

    August 20th, 2008 at 3:03 pm from The Rambling Fish » Blog Archive » King of commodity

Comments

  1. “Vision without execution is hallucination” - Thomas Edison.

    August 20th, 2008 at 3:04 pm by The Rambling Fish

  2. @fish - Agreed, and so does Gartner as they’ve evaluated that as well. If you’re familiar with the Gartner Magic Quadrant, you know that the two areas evaluated are “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute.”

    Only vendors that score high in both vision and execution fall into the Leaders quadrant. Looking at the MQ (link is in the post), Gartner obviously believes Nortel also has the ability to execute — more so than many other companies in the report that fall outside the Leaders quadrant.

    August 20th, 2008 at 8:01 pm by Bo Gowan

  3. Thank you for the reply Mr. Gowan. My concern, and the reasoning for my statement is, Nortel has a vision which seems to far surpass its grasp. This Gartner MQ does nothing to allay that fear.

    Specifically, this MQ in conjunction with the Unified Communications MQ, cites Nortel as having two distinct offerings:
    1. Being the telephony component to OCS. In this case, it’s wonderful to be well entrenched with your partner, and have a complete vision, but the telephony component is rapidly becoming commodity. Nortel can likely execute in this role as the key requirement of a commodity business is lowest price.
    2. Offering a suite based on MCS5100 and CS1000. Having seen the pitch for this offering, I fear this is where he execution seems to fail. The offering seems to be sub-standard in comparison to the rich desktop integration Microsoft brings, or that Siemens and IBM tout. Perhaps the eventual availability of SIP endpoints for the CS1000, and/or the addition of Pingtel assets will improve this situation, but I remain leery as the desktop/IT portion is still lacking. Will the IBM partnership help?

    Thus, my statement is an observation of Nortel’s ability to execute on a complete vision that has a high revenue potential and therefore is a growth segment for the company, as opposed to ‘milking’ a commodity industry.

    Thank you for the discussion.

    August 21st, 2008 at 12:11 pm by The Rambling Fish

  4. Good conversation - my previous life at Nortel was to head up media efforts for our UC business, including our alliances with Microsoft and IBM, so I have a few opinions and experiences here.

    Many times we would get pinged on the question of “why integrate with Microsoft.” The question was usually asked from the thinking that MS would “use” Nortel’s voice/PBX expertise until they didn’t need us anymore, then dump us and take over the voice market.

    This thinking seemed backwards to me. Nortel (like most others) has determine that voice will ultimately just be another application on the network. PBXs will go away — maybe in 5 years, maybe 10 — but eventually. Our opinion is that when voice is “just another app” the vendors that own desktop productivity will have a big say in voice. Thus we’ve worked to integrate as closely as possible with both MS and IBM. If voice will eventually be an application, then why ping Nortel for partnering with MS to be a part of that? Why not ping others for not seeing far enough ahead to know that it’s the desktop applications like Lotus, Office, OCS, and Sametime that will integrate voice as part of a larger productivity pack.

    As for MCS 5100 and CS 1000 — I’d suggest you not focus on that as where Nortel is going, but what we have today. The multimedia/UC functionality of MCS 5100 is being evolved into a software package that can be platform-independent. CS 1000 as an IP-PBX is also obviously evolving to a software focus. Nortel is moving to VoIP and UC solutions that can easily integrate into other hardware platforms (i.e. IBM and others). For example the SCS 500 is a VoIP/UC platform for SMBs that is software-based, open-source, and can be installed on Dell, IBM and HP servers.

    Interestingly, most of the questioning comments I’ve been responding to the last few weeks have not been related to Nortel “milking a commodity industry,” but of us branching into areas where we aren’t seen as leaders (yet), such as open-source (Pingtel acquisition) and virtual collaboration (DiamondWare acquisition and web.alive launch).

    Good discussion. Of course, my opinions likely won’t convince you on our ability to execute…we’ll just have to actually do it.

    August 21st, 2008 at 11:15 pm by Bo Gowan

  5. Very good discussion. Thank you. Indeed, execution is key.

    As for your comment on questions you’d been responding to - this was actually exactly my point. Milking commodity (or being heralded as visionary in a commodity industry) is completely insufficient. Becoming significant in new segments is a goal that must be at the forefront of Nortel’s (or Alcatel-Lucent, or Ericsson, …) transformation strategy.

    Thank you again

    August 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 am by The Rambling Fish

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