Fewer vendors made the leaders' quadrant, but all vendors are making progress on providing more complete offerings.

The 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UCMQ) clarifies the status and directions of the Unified Communications market, as illustrated by (1) the leaders quadrant, (2) the increasing completeness of the UC offerings, and (3) the nature of the market evolution. Let's review each.

(1) The leaders quadrant shows only three companies, down from six last year:

* Microsoft maintains the lead, with the highest ranking for both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision compared to all 14 companies rated in the 2010 UCMQ. Gartner emphasizes the growing adoption of Microsoft Office Communications Server (numbers of companies and size of deployments) and the "significant potential" of combining real-time communications with Microsoft's "historic strength in collaboration and desktops."

* Cisco advanced from 2009 in both dimensions, based both on the acquisition of Tandberg, which makes their "video convergence plans clearer" and the addition of Jabber IM. Gartner emphasizes the "expanding integration and capabilities across its components", the strong global Cisco channels, and the "vision for integrating the WebEx service and Enterprise premise architectures."

* Avaya rounds out the leaders quadrant, also advancing in both dimensions, based on the addition of the Nortel Agile Communications Environment (ACE) software and on Avaya’s "rapidly defined...new management and operational structure, as well as product roadmaps." Gartner emphasizes the completeness of the Avaya portfolio as well as the "migration path toward a secure, end-to-end SIP environment" with the Aura Session Manager and the Session Border Controller option.

Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, and IBM each moved out of the leaders quadrant. The common theme in each case was a limitation to the scope of adoption or the scope of the development and delivery capabilities for the company's UC portfolio. All three remain viable UC market participants and Gartner recommends their consideration in the appropriate situations.

(2) The increasing completeness of the UC offerings is apparent in the review of each supplier. Essentially all of the 14 companies have a UC offering that includes the major elements of software-based clients, voice & telephony, messaging, and conferencing. Most also have presence and instant messaging and varying degrees of communications applications. Mobility is seen by Gartner as an element of the other six categories, not as a separate functional set.

As Gartner notes, each vendor "has at least one strength, for instance, in e-mail, telephony or networking" (or applications as with SAP) and seeks to expand that footprint in the enterprise. The richness of each functional category varies on that basis. This reflects the three primary migration paths to Unified Communications that UniComm Consulting highlights at VoiceCon (Enterprise Connect) and InterOp. A description and video of the May 2010 InterOp session "Choosing a Vendor and Implementing Unified Communications" is posted at UCStrategies.com.