Body:
Every day I come across stories of how organizations use Lync to connect people. I recently discovered how one hospital, Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, is using Lync to enhance the patient experience by connecting them to their families when they’re apart. This is a great example of the experiences and moments that Microsoft technology enables, and it also illustrates how we are delivering on our vision of Universal Communications in a way that everyone can understand.
This story is just one of many real-world examples of how Lync is making a difference. Our customers are using Lync daily to transform and enhance their work, and the industry is recognizing this. To give you an idea of how Lync is being recognized, I want to share with you some recent findings from industry experts who follow the enterprise communications industry and Lync specifically.
I’ll start with Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UCMQ), a report Microsoft has been included in since its inception. We are extremely pleased at Microsoft’s positioning this year in the Leader’s Quadrant. Gartner’s report says, “Leaders have a full UC offering and a strong market presence, and demonstrate success in the field. They have a strong presence in related markets to expand their footprint in UC. These vendors and their channel partners have experience delivering UC to a broad range of enterprise types and into most geographic regions.” I discussed the momentum of our partner community in my earlier blog post from the Worldwide Partner Conference.
You can read the complete Gartner report here.
While the Gartner UCMQ has been around for several years, this is the first year for The Forrester Wave™: On-Premises Unified Communications and Collaboration, Q2 2014. In this report as well, we are delighted with our position in the Leaders band. Forrester Research highlights several areas of our product that stood out to us, including commenting specifically on adoption inside of a business. “Microsoft’s single familiar user interface drives rapid adoption and utilization of its solution by information workers.” You can read the complete Forrester report here. Our customers feel the same way, in fact so much so they came out to Lync Conference 2014 to tell their stories of how Lync has changed their business.
If you couldn’t make it to Lync Conference, check out the presentations from our customers here.
Finally, for the third year in a row T3i has published Impact of Microsoft Lync on the Enterprise Voice Market, an in-depth primary research and analysis of Lync for Enterprise Voice and PBX replacement. This report, taken from a survey of U.S. enterprises (500+ employees) and small businesses, is packed with great details:
- 72% of the U.S. enterprises who participated in the survey were either conducting or had completed trials of Microsoft Lync. This is a huge increase compared to 42% of U.S. enterprises that were in that position a year ago.
- 89% of the U.S. enterprises indicated that Lync Enterprise Voice had been or will be included in their Lync trials.
- More than half of the enterprises that were in the planning stages last year have begun their deployment, thus increasing the percent of enterprises in deployment mode to 44%, nearly tripling from 15% from a year ago.
- When asked for their current preferred vendor for IP-PBXs, 38% of the enterprises selected Microsoft, the highest percentage of any vendor.
We’ve made all of these analysts’ reports available for download from our Analyst Relations site, so you can read them yourselves.
I couldn’t be more proud of these results and the amazing work done by our teams, and I’m looking forward to sharing even more with you in the coming year.
