Microsoft Teams grabs Gartner award for the fifth year in a row

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report for 2023 is now available and Microsoft managed to nab the award for Unified Communications as a Service leader for its fifth year running.

UCaaS has been measured by Gartner for the past nine consecutive years with Microsoft at the head for most of its time. While being more than a mouthful of a title, Gartner’s UCaaS report is believed to reflect “the completeness of CXone as well as a company’s expertise in Digital and AI security.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report uses a dual axis layout displayed both vertically and horizontally dividing the summary into four quarters. Gartner’s UCaaS measures a company’s “Ability to Execute” against its “Completeness of Vision” and has Microsoft listed in the furthest positive corner for both, under “leader.”

Other companies such as RingCentral, Zoom, and Cisco trailed shortly behind Microsoft while GoTo Meeting and Vonage managed to nab awards for being niche players, and Google standing alone a “Challenger.”

Understandably, Microsoft’s vice president of Teams, Nicole Herskowitz took to the Microsoft Teams blog for a victory lap where she exclaims her excitement for the Gartner award.

We are honored to announce that Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)—this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve received this recognition. We are particularly excited and humbled to have been placed highest on the ability to execute axis and furthest on the completeness of vision axis. 

The report evaluates Microsoft for Microsoft Teams which provides telephony, meetings, and messaging. We believe this recognition values the impact of our continued investment in our UCaaS offerings and Teams more broadly—from foundational work to drive the availability and reliability of our services to the introduction of advanced intelligence and AI.  

Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President, Microsoft Teams

Herskowitz goes on to extol the features list that continues to expand for Microsoft Teams as possible reasoning for its five-year award-winning run that includes Intelligent recap, AI-generated notes, Chapters and topics, Personalized timeline and speaker markers as well as live translate, among many others.

As Microsoft explores fewer “unbundling” options with Teams in the EU and UK, it’ll be interesting to see how those decision effect the pace of feature developments and updates, and if that will influence its standing with Gartner’s UCaaS awards in the future.