"Choosing a Unified Communications and Collaboration vendor is a complex decision," Marty Parker, Principal at UniComm Consulting, recently told me. "Any organization looking to refresh their architecture or rework their entire communications and collaboration strategy should be looking at a broad set of relevant Gartner Magic Quadrants.  In our consulting experience, the Gartner Magic Quadrants are often a factor in choosing which vendors will be invited to bid and also, if the evaluations are close, which vendor to select."

Marty also stressed that while there are many additional considerations when choosing a vendor, the Gartner Magic Quadrants provide an independent, highly reputable reference point for a vendor's position in the marketplace. Gartner Magic Quadrants assess vendors on their execution and vision.

We believe that taken together, Cisco's placements in each of the six Gartner Magic Quadrants below validate the strength of our current portfolio and where we are taking the collaboration experience.

Unified Communications: Gartner positions Cisco as a leader and furthest to the right for "Completeness of Vision" in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report. Our vision is about delivering a single delightful collaboration experience that spans all communication modes from any device. And we will deliver this experience on premises, from the cloud, and by seamlessly connecting both cloud and premises together.

Telephony: For the 13^thyear in a row, Gartner positions Cisco as leader in its Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony. Still the foundational element in business communications, telephony is often the most important consideration when choosing a UC vendor.

Video Conferencing: We believe our leadership placement in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for Group Video Systems reflects our work to bring the video experience to new levels while creating solutions at the right quality and value.

Web Conferencing: Gartner recognizes Cisco as a leader in the Web Conferencing market highest in execution and furthest in vision with WebEx. Our customers tell us the Cisco conferencing experience is better than ever.  Capabilities like the new user interface, seamless integrations with existing investments such as Jabber, Cisco TelePresence as well as 3^rdparty standards-based systems make easy to use and easy to join a meeting from any device.

Customer Care: Gartner has positioned Cisco highest in "Ability to Execute" in the Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure for the last four years. We believe this reflects our continued gains in market share, the breadth of our product portfolio, our demonstrated ability to deliver quality customer care solutions, and our unmatched worldwide partner base.

Midsize Enterprises: Last May, Gartner released its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications for Midsize Enterprises in North America. Gartner positioned Cisco as highest in "ability to execute" and emphasized the need for simple, affordable solutions for midsize organizations. We have been working to simplify UC with solutions such as Business Edition 6000.  While midsize businesses have the same collaboration needs as their large enterprise peers, they naturally have fewer IT resources, so the solution has be easy to deploy, manage, and use.

What does this all mean?  Whether you are refreshing your architecture, revamping your collaboration strategy, or just looking to implement one of the many collaboration workloads, these results can provide confidence in Cisco as your collaboration vendor -both for our current capabilities and where we will take your collaboration experience.

See all the reports and more in detail on our Analyst page.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.