Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions
Meeting solutions blend communications, collaboration and content sharing to enable informal and formal meetings anywhere. Along with its Critical Capabilities companion, this research will help application leaders for meeting solutions find the vendors best suited to their needs.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
Meeting solutions blend communications, collaboration and content sharing to enable informal and formal meetings anywhere. Along with its Critical Capabilities companion, this research will help application leaders for meeting solutions find the vendors best suited to their needs.
Market Definition/Description
Meeting solutions are collaboration tools that support interactions between participants for daily teamwork, presentations, training and webinars. Enterprise offerings in this market perform equally well for users in meeting spaces, at their desks or when mobile, with integrated voice, video, messaging and content sharing.
Organizations with complex needs typically use separate meeting solutions for informal collaboration (among users within the same team or project) and for more formal meeting scenarios (external presentations, learning/training scenarios and large-scale webinars). This often causes an organization to deploy solutions from more than one vendor.
Application leaders who are responsible for digital workplace applications deploy meeting solutions to:
• Enhance face-to-face meeting activities (e.g., with content collaboration)
• Reduce geographic barriers for organizational communication
• Increase employee engagement for remote workers and team cohesiveness by using video
• Save time and money by minimizing business travel
• Train remote participants in multiple locations
• Deliver corporate or departmental communication events, such as employee town hall meetings
Complete meeting solutions enable richness of information and interaction by combining messaging, content and screen sharing, video, and audio.
Note: Gartner is not evaluating the stand-alone audio-only conferencing market in this research.
Buying Patterns
Based on Gartner client inquiry and reference customers, enterprise buyers for meeting solutions come from both IT and lines of business (LOBs), whose needs differ:
• IT buyers weigh the audio/video requirements and content sharing capabilities for enterprise meeting solutions in assessing purchasing decisions for horizontal use cases as well as broader unified communications and collaboration (UCC) goals.
• LOBs desire support for specific use cases, such as training, HR interviews of candidates, sales acceleration and marketing webinars.
To optimize cost, meeting solution decisions are made in the context of an organization’s overall collaboration approach, as well as investments in cloud office products that have similar capabilities. It is still often the case that buying decisions for meeting solutions are done independent of decisions regarding enterprise voice platforms, though vendors are increasingly attempting to bundle these two pillars of unified communications.
Many larger organizations choose a tiered approach rather than a single vendor to deliver best-in-class capabilities across a variety of meeting scenarios. Smaller businesses frequently rely on a single meeting service to meet their less-demanding business requirements, focusing primarily on ease of use and cost sensitivities.
Application leaders face a predominantly cloud-based market for meeting solutions, although a minority of buyers still seek hybrid, premises-based as well as managed and dedicated deployment options.
As part of this Magic Quadrant research process, Gartner asked the included vendors’ reference customers to list the key desired business outcomes when purchasing their chosen meeting solution. Here are the five top desired outcomes they cited, in priority order:
1. Creating operational efficiencies
2. Cost management
3. Driving innovation
4. Improving business process agility
5. Enhancing decision making
Trends
Gartner has a strategic planning assumption that may assist application leaders focused on the digital workplace in formulating their position on meeting solutions:
By 2024, remote work and changing workforce demographics will impact enterprise meetings so that only 25% will take place in person, down from 60% today.
Gartner conducted a digital workplace consumer study (see Note 1) to understand digital workers — specifically, shifts and trends in their sentiments and expectations, their level of engagement, and their satisfaction with the applications that their organization provides. The study results show that, in general, workers prefer to have fewer face-to-face meetings than they do today. Also, workers feel they now have sufficient technology to meet from anywhere. Workers without dedicated desks in the office prefer to work remotely, and younger demographics do more video from their desks and laptops rather than from office meeting rooms.
Vendors are responding to this strategic planning assumption and other factors in the meeting solution market by delivering:
• New designs based on ease of use for simplification of host controls, quick joining to meetings, and integration to conference room systems.
• Blended asynchronous (messaging, content, scheduling, tasks, recordings) and synchronous (voice, audio, screen sharing) collaboration in persistent rooms or workspaces.
• Equal capabilities across diverse endpoint types, from group video system codecs to desktops, laptops (through browsers or clients), smartphones, tablets and so on.
• Transcription and language translation for delivering webinars, town hall meetings and quarterly business reviews.
• Artificial intelligence (AI)-influenced technologies that improve the videoconference room experience by automating the meeting join and content sharing processes.
• Optimization of delivery to enterprise networks — for example, by supporting security via VPN or broadcast via CDN.
• Visibility into the enterprise video estate, with integrated management and reporting software providing information on meeting solution performance and usage.
• Integration with related collaboration investments, including UCC and cloud office.
Pricing models that span a range from low-end freemium to high-end premium services.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Adobe
Adobe offers Adobe Connect as SaaS, premises-based, managed service and dedicated deployment options.
Strengths
• Adobe’s focus on customers in government, healthcare, financial services and higher education makes it appealing for environments where a meeting solution must be tailored to specific roles or business needs.
• Adobe Connect’s feature parity across desktop and mobile clients, as well as its key partnerships for hosting, makes it suitable for global organizations supporting desk and mobile workers.
• Reference customers indicated that the richness of its product feature set is a notable strength of Adobe Connect.
Caution
• Adobe has not invested in pursuing some innovations, such as virtual assistants, its own integrated digital whiteboard hardware or integration with smart devices that competitors have.
• As a stand-alone meeting solution, Adobe Connect competes in a market in which cloud office or UCaaS vendors have demonstrated larger deployments, greater scale and more significant growth.
• Adobe’s reference customers report that additional plug-ins, applets or external products needed to be leveraged to support their meeting use cases.
Avaya
Avaya offers its Intelligent Xperiences (IX) meeting solutions as SaaS, premises-based, hybrid, managed and dedicated hosted deployment models, along with its own branded conference room endpoints. It also offers IX Collaboration as SaaS for workstream collaboration.
Strengths
• Avaya offers a variety of deployment options for its meeting solution, giving customers more configuration choices than typically found in this market.
• Avaya offers IX as an integrated experience within its communication and collaboration suite of offerings — simplifying adoption for end users.
• Reference customers report that the audio and video quality of Avaya’s meeting solutions is a strength.
Cautions
• Avaya trails other vendors in the meeting solution space in introducing innovations such as digital whiteboards, conference room smart devices, transcription and leveraging AI to automate the end-user experience in conference rooms.
• Avaya has been late to market with its rollout of a highly scalable, SaaS-based meeting solution, and has not demonstrated wide adoption of its stand-alone meeting solution in the enterprise segment.
• Reference customers surveyed by Gartner stated that they wished Avaya offered more opportunities to interoperate with external meeting solutions.
BlueJeans
Strengths
• BlueJeans has a robust video meeting service and is looking to expand its business through strategic partnerships with Dolby (including a Rooms-as-a-Service option), Microsoft and Facebook.
• BlueJeans has demonstrated that it is listening to its customers by developing new capabilities, such as more efficient meetings processes through its smart meetings initiative.
• Service reliability and improved ease of use were mentioned by BlueJeans reference customers as strengths of its meeting solution.
Cautions
• BlueJeans supports only SaaS-based delivery with typical licensing models. This approach inhibits adoption by organizations desiring freemium and dedicated deployment options.
• BlueJeans needs to generate greater awareness of its capabilities in order to compete more effectively with the better-capitalized leaders in this market.
• According to some of its reference customers, BlueJeans would better serve its customers if it improved its global sales and customer service presence.
Cisco
Strengths
• Cisco’s range of video infrastructure, endpoint and application offerings enable more fully integrated deployment options than any other competitor in this Magic Quadrant. Its offering includes hybrid architectures that help maximize quality and security.
• Cisco has a mature and comprehensive vertical industry program that addresses specific use cases as well as regulatory and compliance requirements for various industries, such as healthcare, financial services and the public sector.
• Reference customers note Cisco’s ability to deliver its meeting solutions globally as well as customer visibility into its product roadmap as strengths.
Cautions
• Enterprise buyers can face multiple and overlapping UC and meeting-related products from Cisco, which challenge decision making on which product to deploy.
• Cisco’s licensing plans continue to evolve, which can create complexity for buyers and channel partners. This is in contrast to the broader market pricing direction toward simplicity.
• Cisco’s reference customers reported that Webex Meetings should leverage additional plug-ins, applets or external products to create better workflows with their preferred business applications.
Enghouse Systems (Vidyo)
Strengths
• Vidyo has an extensive range of deployment options and presence in every major global region, with direct sales, distributors and resellers able to provide sales, delivery and support.
• Vidyo has one of the most comprehensive API strategies of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. This is critical for those customers needing to embed video into business applications with a full range of customization options.
• Ease of deployment and maintenance was cited as a strength by Vidyo’s reference customers.
Cautions
• Vidyo trails the other vendors in this market in introducing innovations such as digital whiteboards, conference room smart devices, and transcription of either live or recorded meetings.
• Based on Gartner’s vendor survey for this research, Vidyo offers a lower level of guaranteed meeting solution availability for its SaaS-based service versus the majority of vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
• Vidyo’s reference customers cited interoperability with legacy or external meeting solutions as a weakness.
Strengths
• Customers benefit from the ability to create meeting workflows across other G Suite products, as well as from Google’s substantial ecosystem of vendor and software partnerships, to further enhance meeting experiences.
• Hangouts Meet is included with G Suite, making it compelling and sensible for enterprises that have “gone Google” to get full value out of their investment by using the vendor’s meeting solution.
• Ease of deployment and maintenance was cited as a strength by Google’s reference customers.
Cautions
• Google’s innovation with meeting virtual assistants is limited to interactions with its @meet chatbot, whereas some competitors have advanced to offer voice command interaction or their own smart devices for enterprise.
• Hangouts Meet is included with G Suite as part of a horizontal collaboration offering. As such, unlike some competitors, the Google offering is not customized for particular vertical industries.
• Google’s reference customers want Hangouts Meet to offer better interoperability with legacy or external meeting solutions.
Huawei
Strengths
• Huawei includes several product features that most vendors in this Magic Quadrant lack, including virtual breakout room support, automated translation of meeting transcripts into two other languages, and native support of its room systems for using displays as digital signage.
• Huawei has a track record of responding to changing market expectations for meeting solutions, having introduced capabilities such as flexibility in meeting recording archiving and retention, and extended options for meeting recording exports to third-party services.
• High-quality audio and video was mentioned by Huawei’s reference customers as a strength of its meeting portfolio.
Cautions
• Huawei has limited adoption processes and programs to help customers succeed with deployments of its meeting solution.
• Huawei’s reference customers noted a desire for more integration options with business software applications and cloud-based services.
• As of August 2019, Huawei is facing economic sanctions from the U.S. government. The impact is unknown due to changing details of potential restrictions, but reduced availability of some of its products and services globally may be possible.
Lifesize
Strengths
Lifesize has aggressively expanded its channels to market and sales initiatives in EMEA and APAC, and accompanied those efforts with a wide range of licensing offers to meet local preferences for purchase and service platform engagement.
Lifesize offers a meeting solution with integrated videoconference room endpoints and a robust feature set, offering capabilities that some of its competitors do not. These include wireless screen presentation, digital signage and virtual meeting assistants.
The quality of audio and video as well as ease of deployment were cited as strengths by Lifesize’s reference customers.
Cautions
Lifesize needs to expand its options for improving content delivery and reducing internal network congestion for large video broadcasts, such as town halls and webinars.
Larger enterprise customers sometimes do not include Lifesize in their considerations for meeting solutions, mainly due to lower market awareness compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Some of Lifesize’s reference customers desire a stronger global sales and customer service presence to support their multinational enterprise.
LogMeIn
Strengths
• LogMeIn has focused on improving meeting workflows, as evidenced by its extensive integrations to third-party productivity, scheduling and sales acceleration solutions. It has also focused on developing meeting transcription as a default feature of its products.
• LogMeIn operates meeting solutions that are popular among enterprises and LOBs, and at a scale greater than most of its competitors in this Magic Quadrant.
• Reference customers surveyed by Gartner report the vendor’s service reliability and consistency, as well as the responsiveness of customer service, as strengths.
Cautions
• LogMeIn may not be suitable for organizations that desire innovation around physical digital whiteboard meeting endpoints, for which competitors have productized offerings.
• LogMeIn’s support for live broadcast does not include technology to accelerate video delivery on internal networks, which is often useful in the live town hall broadcast scenario. Some competitors have their own video optimization technology or partner with third parties for this.
• Better interoperability with legacy and external meeting solutions is desired by LogMeIn reference customers.
Microsoft
Strengths
• Microsoft’s deployment options make it a flexible choice suitable for most organizations. It offers a free version of Microsoft Teams that would be useful for organizations wishing to experiment and compare against other workstream collaboration and meeting offerings.
• Microsoft has demonstrated its focus on customer experience by addressing the needs of enterprise IT buyers and common workforce roles, supporting customer success with extensive change management materials, processes and partners, and with deployments in large customer environments.
• Reference customers surveyed by Gartner report Microsoft’s pace of innovation and improvements as well as service consistency as strengths of Microsoft Teams.
Cautions
• To plan and execute large live meeting broadcasts with Microsoft technologies requires an understanding of multiple products (Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Stream, Yammer), multiple event models (e.g., production studio quality or self-service) and possible third-party video delivery optimization (e.g., ECDN, P2P or multicast).
• Microsoft Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams are horizontal communication offerings. Microsoft Teams includes some functions for collaboration in educational scenarios but depends on partners for other vertical industries.
• Microsoft’s reference customers report a desire for better interoperability with external meeting solutions when using Microsoft Teams.
Pexip
Strengths
• The merger of Pexip with Videxio at the end of 2018 has created a scalable videoconferencing solution that provides a unified experience across mobile, desktop and conference room endpoints.
• Pexip’s partnerships with Microsoft and Google enable it to offer video interoperability between those cloud office UC solutions and group videoconferencing systems across the enterprise estate.
• Interoperability with legacy and external meeting solutions is a notable strength of Pexip, according to its reference customers.
Cautions
• Although Pexip has a native capability to optimize video over a WAN, it does not partner with any other vendor for content delivery/acceleration networking or peer-to-peer delivery.
Pexip does not directly offer client- or server-based meeting recording options. However, it does integrate with cloud- and premises-based third-party recording and archiving services.
• Reference customers say they want Pexip’s meeting solution to leverage plug-ins, applets or external products to satisfy their complex meeting use cases and workflows.
PGi
Strengths
• PGi’s GlobalMeet portfolio has the capabilities and global reach to satisfy businesses of all sizes and locations, with meeting solutions that are anchored in its well-established audioconferencing service.
• GlobalMeet’s Webinar and Webcast offerings include the required capabilities to deliver a highly scalable, feature-rich experience for large corporate events.
• Reference customers cite quality of audio as a strength of PGi’s GlobalMeet offerings.
Cautions
• PGi’s pace of innovation trails that of some vendors in this market, specifically with respect to improving conference room experiences through the use of automation and smart devices.
• GlobalMeet is designed to satisfy the generalized meeting solution market, but lacks the partners and integration options to deliver a portfolio of vertical market solutions.
• The GlobalMeet client is less intuitive than some of its reference customers would like. Application leaders should anticipate budgeting more time for end-user training when deploying GlobalMeet.
Pexip
Strengths
• The merger of Pexip with Videxio at the end of 2018 has created a scalable videoconferencing solution that provides a unified experience across mobile, desktop and conference room endpoints.
• Pexip’s partnerships with Microsoft and Google enable it to offer video interoperability between those cloud office UC solutions and group videoconferencing systems across the enterprise estate.
• Interoperability with legacy and external meeting solutions is a notable strength of Pexip, according to its reference customers.
Cautions
• Although Pexip has a native capability to optimize video over a WAN, it does not partner with any other vendor for content delivery/acceleration networking or peer-to-peer delivery.
Pexip does not directly offer client- or server-based meeting recording options. However, it does integrate with cloud- and premises-based third-party recording and archiving services.
• Reference customers say they want Pexip’s meeting solution to leverage plug-ins, applets or external products to satisfy their complex meeting use cases and workflows.
StarLeaf
Strengths
• StarLeaf’s video collaboration solution is resonating with buyers seeking a reliable platform that delivers high-quality meeting experiences in its conference rooms. This is evidenced by the vendor’s impressive growth in its targeted markets.
• StarLeaf has implemented a multichannel customer success program that helps clients get onboard the service quickly, and analytics to support growth in adoption across the user community.
• Ease of deployment and interoperability with external meeting solutions are reported as strengths by StarLeaf’s reference customers.
Cautions
• StarLeaf’s meeting service is offered as SaaS only, which can limit adoption by organizations requiring premises-based or dedicated hosted deployment options.
• StarLeaf offers fewer options for recording meetings than other vendors in this market, which may be a problem for organizations that need more flexibility and capability in how meetings are recorded and archived with video content management systems.
• Some reference customers said they desire a wider global sales and customer service presence from StarLeaf.
TrueConf
Strengths
For the regions in which the vendor operates, TrueConf’s focus on areas such as government, legal, healthcare and education makes it appealing for environments where a meeting solution must be tailored to specific vertical industries.
• TrueConf has a rich feature set for conference rooms, desktops and mobile devices. This feature set supports industry standard and legacy video systems, and leverages machine learning and other techniques for bandwidth adaptation and to support high-quality video.
• TrueConf’s meeting solution consistency and reliability was mentioned as a strength by its reference customers.
Cautions
• TrueConf has not invested in some areas where competitors are innovating, such as with physical digital whiteboards or smart virtual personal meeting assistants.
• Most customers use TrueConf Server rather than TrueConf Online, with scalability capped at 250 participants for Server and 120 participants for Online. TrueConf’s architecture has acceleration technology to improve video on internal networks, and the vendor has external CDN partnerships, but buyers should validate what third-party elements will be needed to run very large live webcasts.
• Wider global presence and integration with business applications are desired by TrueConf’s reference customers.
TrueConf
• TrueConf offers TrueConf Server for premises-based deployments and TrueConf Online as SaaS, along with partner endpoints for conference rooms.
Strengths
For the regions in which the vendor operates, TrueConf’s focus on areas such as government, legal, healthcare and education makes it appealing for environments where a meeting solution must be tailored to specific vertical industries.
• TrueConf has a rich feature set for conference rooms, desktops and mobile devices. This feature set supports industry standard and legacy video systems, and leverages machine learning and other techniques for bandwidth adaptation and to support high-quality video.
• TrueConf’s meeting solution consistency and reliability was mentioned as a strength by its reference customers.
Cautions
• TrueConf has not invested in some areas where competitors are innovating, such as with physical digital whiteboards or smart virtual personal meeting assistants.
• Most customers use TrueConf Server rather than TrueConf Online, with scalability capped at 250 participants for Server and 120 participants for Online. TrueConf’s architecture has acceleration technology to improve video on internal networks, and the vendor has external CDN partnerships, but buyers should validate what third-party elements will be needed to run very large live webcasts.
• Wider global presence and integration with business applications are desired by TrueConf’s reference customers.
Zoom
Strengths
• Zoom’s wide array of deployment options, including freemium, allows organizations flexibility when considering how best to consume its increasingly popular video collaboration service.
• Zoom’s rich meeting solution feature set, expanding partner community, and integration with services such as Slack and RingCentral are driving demand for the vendor’s services by end users and IT organizations alike.
• Service reliability and the pace of innovation and improvements were cited by Zoom’s reference customers as strengths.
Cautions
• Zoom maintains both direct and indirect sales channel selling processes. This can sometimes lead to sales channel conflicts, which can confuse IT buyers or lengthen negotiations unnecessarily.
• The cost to purchase Zoom’s meeting solutions is typically lower than that of most competitors, but buyers need to be aware that the items bundled in at no additional cost initially may carry a price increase upon service renewal.
• Zoom’s reference customers cite a desire for more integration options for their preferred business applications, as well as better interoperability with external meeting solutions.
ZTE
Strengths
• ZTE offers the features and endpoints required to meet the demands of IT buyers who want to offer their end users a high-quality videoconference experience.
• ZTE offers a variety of deployment options for its meeting solution, giving customers more configuration choices than typically found in this market.
• Reference customers report high-quality video and service reliability as strengths of ZTE’s meeting solution.
Cautions
• ZTE’s meeting solutions are designed to satisfy the generalized videoconferencing market, and lack the integration options to deliver vertical market solutions.
• ZTE’s primary product and service partner community is in China. Organizations with facilities outside of China should ensure there will be sufficient product supply and support in their regions.
• Reference customers surveyed for this report cite a desire for better TrueMeet integration options with their preferred business applications from ZTE.
Vendors Added and Dropped
Added
• Avaya — The revenue for its meeting segment in the UCC portfolio now exceeds the required threshold.
• Enghouse Systems (Vidyo) — Enghouse has acquired Vidyo, which has appeared in prior iterations of this research.
• Pexip — Its merger with Videxio now provides for the service delivery capabilities that enterprise IT buyers require.
• TrueConf — The revenue for its meeting solution now exceeds the required threshold.
• ZTE — It has featured in prior iterations but was excluded from the 2018 report because of export-control-related political decisions that impacted its operational status at that time.
Dropped
• Arkadin — Shifts in its portfolio have resulted in its latest offerings not meeting the inclusion criteria.
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders have achieved significant influence and market share relative to their competitors in the meeting solution market, while demonstrating an ability to respond to customers’ needs. Leaders have robust, scalable meeting solutions with a wide range of features to satisfy all meeting scenarios, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders are doing well today and are prepared for the future.
Challengers
Challengers are characterized by operational excellence and good standing in the meeting solution market. Compared with Leaders and Visionaries, their solutions may lack the same pace of innovation and the collaboration or host control features to support all meeting use cases. Additionally, they may lack the necessary licensing model flexibility and offerings to satisfy vertical market requirements.
Visionaries
Visionaries typically have important, unique and/or well-developed collaboration capabilities in their meeting solutions. They provide key innovations that point to the future of this market, and have the features needed to satisfy a variety of meeting solution use cases. However, they have not yet developed a large installed base or sufficiently substantial finances to be considered a Leader and influence the whole market.
Niche Players
Niche Players have good technology in their meeting solutions and should be considered by many businesses in order to satisfy their meeting requirements. They are, however, limited by their size, competitive pressures from more influential vendors, geographic reach and/or financial circumstances. Some have chosen a niche strategy (for example, regional vendors with a local focus, or targeted functionality such as premises-based videoconference room solutions).
