Following the rapid deployment of collaborative meeting services for workers sent home to ride out the pandemic, enterprise organizations must now move beyond their tactical initiatives and develop more concrete and robust long-term communication and collaboration strategies that place factors such as business continuity, workforce agility, and competitive advantage at the center of the decision making. This is no easy task: As businesses scramble to evaluate the right tool for their workforces, the sheer amount of choices out there can make the selection process daunting.
From our global
"Future of Work" survey, conducted in August 2020, Omdia found the pandemic has influenced decisions regarding technology vendor and service provider partners for 60% of the 500 large enterprise respondents. But, we also know that finding a vendor for collaborative meeting services, which blend video and web conferencing in one platform and facilitate virtual meetings employees, partners, suppliers, and customers using a range to endpoints, can be challenging. The big issue is that there is no tangible way to evaluate vendors, feature sets, and suitability for a particular organization.
Given the crowded market, organizations must do their due diligence to ensure they select a best fit platform for their needs. Toward that end, Omdia has developed a new and improved approach to the selection of a solution provider with the technology users and buyers at its heart. The new product, called Omdia Universe, analyzes vendors for their current capabilities, readiness for the future, and most importantly, mirror the actual experiences and requirements of the tech user community.
Omdia’s purpose through this Universe research is to help technology decision-makers take informed, balanced, and smart decisions so that they can best utilize and benefit from the myriad of collaborative meeting services solutions that exist. In turn, Omdia wants to help technology vendors further understand their position in the market and how they can better address the needs of users and anticipate the technology disruption of the future.
To best support our objective of guiding technology decision makers, the report looks at broad set of solution capability offered by 11 vendors: 8x8, Avaya, BlueJeans by Verizon, Cisco, Google, Lifesize, LogMeIn, Microsoft, Pexip, StarLeaf, and Zoom. It digs deep into customer experience with each of the above services. To garner customer insights, Omdia did a customer survey as well as partnered with software review site TrustRadius to support and further inform this report and provide relevant insights from customer reviews. Omdia thus creates a balanced and enhanced picture to inform and advise decision makers about the end-user experience with products from the 11 vendors we evaluated. Omdia choose Trust Radius as the most trusted review site for business technology, used by more than one million buyers each month and optimized for content quality and data integrity.
Following a strict criterion for inclusion/exclusion of a vendor, the Omdia Universe not only ranks vendors but also looks at the key trends, market dynamics, and activities to provide businesses and IT executives an up-to-date view of the collaborative meetings market in 2021. Along with many interesting findings, Collaborative Meeting Services Universe identifies three market leaders, along with three challenges that are competing aggressively via their differentiated offerings. Five prospects appear to be catching up quickly with attractive bundling and selling into SMBs and enterprises that require less complex solutions.
This article was original published on February 15, 2021 (click here for the orignal article).
