Gartner Magic Quadrant's: Any use to anybody on their own?

The post summer phase of the year often brings new challenges, and this year is certainly no different as we gear up to start really building new capabilities in the business.  Part of that process has meant that I have had the opportunity to attend many a vendor briefing, and what has struck me is how the "Gartner Magic Quadrant's" get interpreted and used in presentations.

In 9 out of 10 times, a single view of the latest Magic Quadrant is trotted out to justify a marketing statement.  If I had a penny for each time that a vendor claimed that they were now the market leader and used a MQ graphic to justify the claim ...... I should long ago be sitting very comfortably on a beach in the Bahamas with a tall cool drink in hand.

Practitioner's that are tracking the market generally will examine fairly large volumes of data in order to be able to spot a trend and draw any sort of meaningful conclusion.  MQ's are not comprehensive data sets, and are simply one set of data points, they simply do not tell the whole story.



Consider the latest version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2011 as an example.  Flicking through it,  it is easy to draw the conclusion that the usual suspects are the market leaders: Microsoft, Cisco, and Avaya; and nothing much else has changed - pretty much what one would expect.
But to take those simplified conclusions away would be a mistake.  There is a battle looming between two different strategies and a trend that has to be spotted in order to really understand what is happening and it only becomes obvious when one compares the latest 2x2 with previous releases.

Let's take a jump back to September 2009:   Microsoft out in front, a lead clearly built on the back of their market leading, desktop focused, messaging and collaboration products.  Cisco is significantly behind as are the rest of the market.  Take note of where Mitel and IBM are positioned.

Let's wind forward to July 2010...  Microsoft still out in front, but with a much smaller gap between them and their closest competitor Cisco, with Avaya trailing.   Note the position of Alcatel-Lucent and also where Mitel and Siemens Enterprise Communications are.

Lets jump forward to today (Aug-11) and take a look at the latest version:

There are two points of significance to note:  (1) Microsoft is standing still relative to Cisco who could be viewed as the market leader in the telephony space due to their installed base in the core service provider and enterprise networks.  Alcatel-Lucent is now a significant challenger with Mitel and Siemens completing the set of competitors.  (2) The other point to take note of is that Avaya continues to lose ground relative to the top 2.  Mitel is certainly a potential future challenger.

So where is the trend?   If one looks at the different vendor strategies in detail there is a clear reason why Avaya is falling behind.  While Microsoft is primarily a desktop based value proposition, they have increasingly embraced the "cloud based" delivery models. Office365 being a case in point.  This has aided the removal of the blocks in the user (enterprise) psyche and speeded up the adoption of "cloud" delivery models. This, in turn, has benefited the likes of Cisco, Mitel and Alcatel-Lucent who have recognised that service providers are well placed to help drive converged, cloud based solutions when it comes to IP telephony, collaboration, video and mobile solutions in the enterprise.
The conclusion?  It will be interesting to see how this picture shapes up in the coming 12-18 months.  Avaya has fallen behind as it clings onto an enterprise revenue stream, and avoids embracing the cloud. The battle lines have been drawn around the cloud, it will be interesting to see which of the vendors wins the next round.

So what's the point for business leaders, CEO's, CIO's, strategy leads, product management and other influencers of technology selection?  Spend some time looking beyond the hype from the analysts and the vendors - quite often there are some "potential" trends that can be identified which may open up some potential avenue's of opportunity.  Who knows?  You may just get the jump on your competitor.