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Avaya Celebrates a Decade of Magic Quadrant Success

By Christopher Mohr
Contributing Writer

Avaya recently announced that for the 10^th straight year, it is in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner (News - Alert) Research’s Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony. The company received the recognition on the strength of its ability to execute combined with its completeness of vision.

According to the report, vendors that designed, manufactured, and distributed on-premises corporate telephony solutions for more than 1,000 users were eligible for consideration. Gartner also looked at criteria including service uptime, support for emergency services, quality of experience monitoring, softphone capability, and hybrid cloud support.

The matrix is a graph with the y-axis measuring ability to execute and the x-axis measuring completeness of vision. Companies strong in both areas appear in the Leaders quadrant. For 2015, there were only three such companies: Mitel, Avaya, and Cisco (News - Alert).

It is instructive to look at past graphs to see where certain companies fall on a year-to-year basis. Last year’s Magic Quadrant, for example, included Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) Enterprises (now known as ALE), but both companies are not in that quadrant in the latest report. They remained solid in their ability to execute, but dropped back in completeness of vision. This seems to suggest that both companies lack vision, and may behind the times from a technology standpoint.  

Mitel (News - Alert) had the opposite results from 2014. While remaining strong in its ability to execute, it improved in completeness of vision and entered the latest Leaders Quadrant. Cisco has remained the overall leader in both graphs, making it the company to beat as it were.

As for Avaya (News - Alert), its strengths lie in being a powerful and reputable brand to contact centers and telephony customers. Its media server and session border controller made its Aura platform more scalable, and its Engagement Development Platform has proven helpful to enterprises making business-specific customizations that integrate with communications platforms.

The company needs to work on fixing channel conflict between its internal sales department and channel partners. This has a tendency to create resentment among channel partners, who won’t be as eager to preach the Avaya message if they feel squeezed out. The need to consolidate Aura and Scopia clients along with the need to provide more flexible licensing models are other areas Gartner feels needs improvement.

Overall, the report card is pretty good for Avaya. To appear in the Magic Quadrant for an entire decade is no small feat. Not only does a company have to perform, it also has to adapt to changing times, since Magic Quadrant criteria can change from one year to another. This is a great selling point to an enterprise or contact center looking for a vendor with a good track record and one likely to be good in the future.