Microsoft and Cisco: Leaders in the Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service

Gartner this week published their 2023 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service. The full report from Gartner details all the players across all quadrants. This blog is a summary of the highlights from this report on the strengths and weaknesses across both Microsoft and Cisco – who have been in the top right quadrant for many years.

2023 – Key Unified Comms Trends – by Gartner

Gartner’s report identifies an increasing demand for bundles UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, along with the continued growing popularity and demand for Microsoft Teams for voice, meetings and messaging. They also point out the growing importance of CPaaS for customisation and integration, and the changing preferences of users moving more towards collaboration rather than telephony and dial-tone calling. There are five leaders in the 2023 magic quadrant ranked in the following order:

  1. Microsoft
  2. Ring Central
  3. Zoom
  4. Cisco
  5. 8×8

I have summarised the core two vendors I work closely with below

Summary of Microsoft’s Position in 2023

  • Microsoft Positioning: Microsoft remain 1st – top right in the leader’s quadrant with the gap between their competitors increasing. They continue to grow their market share and this year have seen more vendors join their partner eco system for phones and meeting rooms including Cisco.
  • Microsoft’s strengths: Microsoft Teams is the most popular choice in the UCaaS market, especially for organisations that are already using it for messaging and meetings. Microsoft Teams’ telephony capabilities satisfy the requirements of most organisations, and Microsoft has invested have many options to bring telephony into Teams including their own calling plans, direct routing, direct routing as a service and more recently in Operator Connect services. Microsoft has strong financial health and a long track record as a UC/UCaaS vendor. Their seamless integration into both Microsoft 365 and vast extensibility has been a key ingredient for its continued success.
  • Microsoft’s cautions: Microsoft Teams Phone still has some gaps in advanced telephony features, which require third-party solutions or integrations – though it is noted that they are working to close these. Gartner also points out that Microsoft does not offer a self-developed contact center solution for Teams which requires customers to choose from a wide range of varying solutions and levels of integration. Gartner also calls out that Microsoft’s availability SLA target for core UC services (other than PSTN) is lower than most of the UCaaS market.

Summary of Cisco’s Positioning in 2023

  • Cisco Positioning: Cisco remain in the top right quadrant (4th out of 5) but have been over-taken recently by pureplay UCaaS vendors including Zoom and RingCentral. They remain a solid UCaaS vendor with quality products and services.
  • Cisco’s strengths: Gartner credit Cisco as one of the few UCaaS vendors that can deliver a complete, self-developed UC portfolio, including hardware, software, and cloud services. They call out that Cisco has deep expertise and investments in security, regulatory, and industry-specific capabilities and certifications. Cisco has also made big improvements in its Webex Control Hub for unified management, making it a competitive option for large and/or highly distributed multinational organisations.
  • Cisco’s cautions: Gartner say that Cisco’s offering is perceived to be more expensive than its competitors, and its pricing strategy is not very aggressive. Cisco’s Webex contact center solution, whilst suitable for small or midsize contact centres, is not best choice for large, high-volume ones. Cisco faces continued fierce competition from other UCaaS vendors that offer collaboration capabilities to its existing customers, and many have also partnered with Microsoft to provide more choice.

The following table shows a comparison of the vendor, strengths and cautions:

VendorStrengthsCautions
MicrosoftPopular and growing choice for voice, messaging and meetings

Satisfactory telephony capabilities

Strong integration with their own- and third-party apps and services.

Strong financial health and track record with loyal customer base.
Gaps in advanced telephony features

No self-developed contact center option

Lower availability SLA target

Confusing PSTN options
CiscoComplete, self-developed UC portfolio

Deep expertise and investments in security and regulatory

Strong unified management for large and distributed organisations
Perceived to be more expensive than competitors with complicated discount schemes

Contact center solution not suitable for large, high-volume ones

Vast competition from other UCaaS vendors for collaboration
Summary of Cisco and Microsoft in 2023 Garner MQ for UCaaS

Summary

In summary, this report evaluates the UCaaS providers based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Microsoft and Cisco are both Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, but they have different strengths and weaknesses.

Gartner say that Microsoft excels in messaging and meetings but lacks advanced telephony features without third parties and has no native contact center solution.

Gartner say that Cisco offers a comprehensive UC portfolio but is more costly and less competitive in contact center. They also have fierce competition amidst the continued growth of Teams and pure play UCaaS providers.

Webex Contact Center now certified for Microsoft Teams

Bread with Teams and Cisco Logo

Webex Contact Center is an Enterprise Class CCaaS solution that enables skill-based routing of inbound “call centre” type calls and is designed to provide a seamless end-to-end customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.

The big news this week is that Cisco Webex Contact Centre has just received office Microsoft Teams certification.

This is great for organisations, Microsoft, Cisco, and solution partners.

Great for Organisations

The Webex Contact Center Integration for Microsoft Teams combines rich omni-channel customer engagement capabilities with Microsoft Teams to break down barriers between contact center agents and the enterprise.

Whilst the CCaaS space in Teams is already quite well served by other vendors such as Luware, Anywhere 365, and Enghouse, Cisco Webex Contact Centre is a true Enterprise Class Contact Centre, trusted by many of the world largest enterprise organisations including EasyJet for example.

Some organisations who have been keen to fully embrace the potential of Microsoft Teams have often found themselves compromising on alternative “certified” CCaaS platforms. They can now have the best of both in a fully supported environment.

Great for Microsoft

In short this helps them protect their install base, since Microsoft certainly does not want to see their competition like Zoom, RingCentral, or Google muscle into their accounts base on the strength of their CCaaS offerings. By working with Cisco (as they are also doing in the Meeting Room space) they can now work more strategically together since Cisco and Microsoft already share around 90% of the same customer base.!

  • Adds a truly enterprise class CCaaS platform into the Teams ecosystem
  • Will further strengthen the partnership and collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco, the two leading technology companies that offer complementary solutions increasing the overall value proposition to their shared customer base.
  • Helps Microsoft expands the market reach of Microsoft Teams, which is already boasts more than with 280 million monthly users without (less) fear of losing market share to Cisco.
  • For organisations who require the best CCaaS solutions without compromising or mixing their collaboration and productivity tools, they leverage Cisco Webex Contact Centre without disrupting the flow of work for loyal Teams users with a seamless and integrated CCaaS solution from Cisco.

Great for Cisco

For Cisco this enables them to compete less and instead offer enterprise CCaaS services to their existing customer base who have been migrating or plan to migrate their UC platform to Microsoft Teams. Rather than risk losing out on the Contact Centre solution, Cisco can now meet their customers on their “turf“, providing the Contact Centre and CX solutions their customers need on their collaboration and productivity platform of choice whether that is Webex or Microsoft Teams.

Great for Microsoft and Cisco Partners

OK, so a little plug here for Cisilion (my employer), but for us (and therefore for me personally) I am excited about this because this brings an immense opportunity for Cisilion to leverage our unique position in our Cisco and Microsoft partnerships expertise and capability which will hugely benefit the services and solutions we can deliver to our clients.

  • As a Microsoft Teams specialist partner and Cisco Master Collaboration partner in the we are now empowered to deliver the best in enterprise CCaaS solutions to our customers alongside their choice of wider collaboration and productivity tools whether that is Cisco CUCM, Cisco Webex, or Microsoft Teams.
  • It helps us to attract and retain customers who are looking for a seamless and reliable customer service experience across multiple channels without having to shift partner due to technology choice changes.
  • It enables us to strengthen our deep partnerships and experience with enterprise class calling, meetings, platform and contact centres solutions across the two leading trusted technology providers.
  • Extends our ability to provide end-to-end design, implementation, integration, support and manged services across Cisco and Microsoft Collaboration solutions.
  • Enables us to provide cost and operational efficiencies both internally and to our customers.

Cisco Webex Contact Centre for Teams

The key outcomes that Webex CCaaS provides when integrated with Teams includes:

  • For the first time, brings a Unified calling platform between Cisco Webex Contact Centre and the organisations Microsoft Teams environment.
  • Allows for improved cross-function collaboration, knowledge sharing, and Customer Experience reporting among agents, supervisors, and other Teams users.
  • Advanced intelligent skill-based routing and queuing, which means customers can reach the right agent faster and more efficiently.
  • Providing a full and seamless customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.
  • Delivers the core functionalities that high-performing multi-disciplined customer service teams require, such as call recording, voicemail, auto attendant, intelligent AI powered chat services, call back and rich social media integration.
  • Includes next-generation end-to-end Cisco security for Enterprise Class data protection and privacy in combination with that provided across the Microsoft 365 Security suite.
  • Brings exceptional management and supervisory controls and actional insights over “customer call handling”, with features like call analytics, call quality management, sentiment analysis, call control and full customer Lifecycle management.

Find out more

For more information about the announcement please see the following links.

Microsoft Announcement

Cisco Webex Contact Centre

Microsoft Teams Phone System SLAs is now 99.99% and financially backed

Microsoft has updated the SLAs for Teams Calling Plans, Phone System, and PSTN Audio Conferencing to four nines / 99.99%.

This reflects the continuous work Microsoft are doing in the background to provide the very best quality, reliability, availability and calling experiences. Microsoft say in their blog that “while it’s natural to do a simple comparison of SLAs throughout the industry, there’s richer story about the new SLAs for Teams Phone that goes beyond the nines”.

SLA goes beyond just phone systen

The Microsoft Teams SLA is actually made up of multiple Microsoft Teams components which are defined separately in the SLA;

  • Microsoft Teams (the core service) that includes chat, calling, meetings etc.
  • Calling Plans, Phone System, auto attendant service and PSTN Audio Conferencing
  • Voice Quality (if impacted by Microsoft network and not your own LAN/WiFi)

In this update, Calling Plans, Phone System, and Audio Conferencing have risen from the previous 99.9% to 99.99%. Voice quality SLA remains at 99.9% (which is about 44 minutes a year) and in line with the core Microsoft 365 SLA.

Financially Backed

When any of these metrics fall below 99.99% in a given month, Microsoft calculates the total downtime and pay-out service credit based on length of incident (in minutes) multiplied by the number of users potentially impacted by the incident or outage and provide monthly service credit back at up to 100%.

Here’s how Microsoft calculates SLA’s for Teams Voice:

Note; This SLA does not cover outages caused by a failure of third-party software, equipment, or services not controlled by Microsoft, or Microsoft software not being run by Microsoft as part of the service (e.g. third-party PBX solutions integrated into Teams). This also excludes Carrier Connect services so its important to check the SLAs with your provider (if you have one).

Read the full SLA

https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-for-Online-Services?s=09