No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Mid-Market and Enterprise Vote Atos Unify as Best PBX

gustavofrazao_AdobeStock_105435947.jpg

Image: gustavofrazao - stock.adobe.com

Atos has been making headlines in the news with its announcement of "Unify Office by RingCentral." With this offering, Atos gets a fast-tracked cloud product for resale and shaves years off the process of building a UCaaS solution from scratch. But the real story is upstream, with Atos Unify mid-market and enterprise customers.

In the Eastern Management Group's satisfaction survey "2020 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction," Atos Unify ranked highest in Customer Satisfaction by mid-market and enterprise PBX Customers. Unify led 33 PBX providers, including Cisco and Avaya, for the top spot. All PBX technologies (i.e., IP PBX, hosted, hybrid, and server virtualization) were part of the study. More than 4,000 IT manager customers worldwide participated in the research. Eastern Management Group classifies businesses with more than 300 employees as mid-market and more than 500 employees as enterprise.

Customer Measurements
Unify was first overall in seven of 12 customer satisfaction measurements in three categories:

  1. Product: technology & product, management tools
  2. Vendor Experience: installation, billing, support
  3. Customer Delight: overall satisfaction, recommend to a friend

 

UC Applications Scorecard
In a corollary study, the Eastern Management Group asked Unify PBX customers to identify their most valuable UC applications. These customers reported receiving value from all 12 UC applications examined, and very high value from mobility, messaging, VoIP, and SIP.

Mid-market and Enterprise PBX Portfolio
As a cohort, mid-market and enterprise businesses show a large, sustainable demand for premises PBXs. According to "Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2020-2027," 50% of all PBXs bought in 2019 by these sizable companies were premises-based; some 23-26% were UCaaS.

Unify’s on-site PBX products provide carrier-grade reliability and scalability to 500,000 users. The company's key PBX solutions for mid-market and enterprise are:

OpenScape Business: This is an all-in-one UC solution for companies with one or more locations. It includes presence, conferencing, contact center, messaging, IM, mobility, and fax. The PBX is scalable from two to 2000 users for standalone and multi-site environments.

OpenScape Enterprise: This is a scalable PBX from 200 to 5,000 users at unlimited sites. All locations get centrally managed by the customer's data center. Installation and setup are streamlined to save customers up to 40% over alternative systems.

OpenScape 4000: This is a single system that scales to 12,000 users. The architecture is Hybrid TDM/IP-PBX. Since the PBX system is a workhorse, it's equipped with an active-standby dual node architecture.

OpenScape UC Application V10: This is a highly open UC solution that integrates with all existing applications for customers with up to 15,000 users. The system is based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integrates itself in different IT and telephony environments as well as in legacy-based Microsoft or HCL (IBM) applications. Presence, rich presence, and instant messaging (chat) are among the best UC applications on the market.

Eastern Management Group's survey of Unify customers finds concentrations in these vertical markets ranked as follows: electronics, professional services, communications (service provider), construction and engineering, energy and utilities, automotive, healthcare, and retail. Unify, on its own, reports the company's specialty vertical markets are: financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, public sector and defense, major events, resources, and services.

 

Unify is a Tradition, Not Just a Company
Long before Atos Unify, there was Siemens AG (parent), IBM (grandparent), and ROLM (great grandparent) - AKA developer of the first digital PBX. Atos Unify is just the latest generation in a family of proud PBX artisans, all cut from the same DNA, producing high-quality PBXs distributed by respected expert partners. Years ago, while sharing a bottle or two of Meursault with ROLM's founder Ken Oshman, at a NY French restaurant, he pledged ROLM to be the best-of-the-best PBX companies destined to be the number one provider of business phone systems, which it then became, and not to my surprise. Today, for mid-market and enterprise customers, the company delivers on that pledge as Atos Unify.

It can't be ignored that Unify is the digital solutions part of Atos SE, which itself is a 12 billion euro company with a staff of 110,000. Mid-market and enterprise customers have high expectations of companies that sell and support them with PBXs, and Atos delivers as much in more than 100 countries.


The research used in this post comes from the following Eastern Management Group sources: "Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2020-2027" and "2020 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction Report.” For more information on these studies and reports, please contact John Malone directly at 212-738-9402 Ext. 2201 or [email protected].