Last week, Gartner named Cisco a leader in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. Gartner placed our "dot" highest and furthest right for vision and execution among the participating vendors. In a related post, Tom McCafferty provides insight about the process of participating in Gartner's analysis. As he puts it, Gartner doesn't just "drop some dots on a chart," but uses detailed data to assess vendors.

Gartner uses this same data in its 2016 Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications report. This report digs deeper into the vendors represented in the Gartner UC Magic Quadrant. In Gartner's words, it's "intended to help organizations define their requirements and select specific products that match their needs as aligned with one of the use cases."

Cisco received the highest scores acrossallthe use cases Gartner defines as critical for unified communications:

• Full UC with Strong Telephony
• Full UC with Strong Collaboration
• Full UC for Midsize Organizations
• Ability to offer Hybrid Solutions

These critical capabilities are important components of our overall mission to provide the best user experiences for both users and IT teams. We're making continual efforts -and progress -toward this mission. Some highlights over the last year, as they relate to these four capabilities, include:

Full UC with Strong Telephony:We've made considerable R&D investment into telephony and video. Our aim is to make it reliable and available for users as they become more mobile and for organizations they move to cloud. We added resilient and adaptive audio codecs like OPUS; implemented forward error correction; further minimized latency; improved metrics, monitoring, management, and more. All this is to ensure that the experience to access these services over the internet are as delightful as those on your WAN/LAN.

Full UC with Strong Collaboration:Cisco Spark is a cloud-based collaboration service that provides message, meet, and call capabilities delivered through Cisco partners and hosted in Cisco data centers. It's a holistic service and mobile-first offering. It's a complete telephony, video and web conferencing, and secure business messaging within an integrated experience centered around the messaging app. We've built Cisco Spark on an open, extensible API-centric platform to foster custom solutions, new experiences, and innovation.

Full UC for Midsize Organizations:It's not all about the enterprise. We've focused more on bringing cloud- and premises-based services to midsize (and small!) organizations so that you can have the same tools and capabilities to drive business forward at the right price with the right feature set.

Ability to offer Hybrid Solutions:Cisco Spark Hybrid Services can help you connect the Cisco Cloud to on-premises investments like Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Business Edition, and even Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution. Our goal is not only to help you extend value, but also use prem and cloud together to drive new and better experiences.

These highlights, among many others, are what we shared with Gartner during the evaluation process.  We believe that these are some of the primary reasons why we received the highest critical capability scores. And maybe even why our "dot" was placed highest and furthest right in the 2016 UC Magic Quadrant.  Regardless, we pleased to see that the industry recognizing our capabilities and our vision.

Learn more about what Gartner and other analysts think about our Collaboration portfolio. Visit our Collaboration Analyst Reports listing.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Cisco.

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.