I had a meeting with the 'unified communications' researcher executive from Gartner.
As a product marketer, I do get a chance from time to time to meet industry analysts and share with them our views on a variety topics affecting our industry, customer behavior and technology directions.
Bern has written about the scope of the Unified Communications market, defining it as a series of applications that include Telephony, Messaging, Conferencing, Mobility and Call Center.
It was fun showing our positioning of the various applications, and discussing how they aligned with his views. With the exception of Elliot's inclusion of email as an application part of the Unified Communications framework (I disagree with that because it's a store and forward and has nothing to do with realtime communications) our positioning of our portfolio capabilities is spot-on with the fundamentals of what Gartner predicts.
I was disappointed that 3Com didn't appear in his UC magic quadrant, but we agreed to keep him apprised of our progress in this area [In fact, others were surprised that some vendors were so prominently featured]. But, that's where his insights/experience in the call center domain weighs a little heavier than it probably should.
