DES MOINES, IA – January 5, 2011 – LightEdge Solutions, a leading provider of hosted unified communications and cloud computing services for small and medium-sized businesses today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the 2010 Unified Communication as a Service North American report. The annual report analyzes Hosted Unified Communications providers based on ability to execute and completeness of vision including: market understanding, product strategy, overall viability, track record, innovation and vertical strategy.
In traditional business communication models, all communication hardware and software is owned and maintained by the end-user with any “unification” coming though custom development. With Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), all communications are delivered through unified enterprise-grade platforms within a service provider’s network cloud. Because UCaaS is utilized through a subscription model, businesses are able to reap the benefits of a truly unified communications package and save money by paying only for what they use rather than paying substantial capital expenses for hardware and software that must periodically be maintained and upgraded.
LightEdge Connected Office, the suite of hosted Unified Communications services, is available as a complete integrated solution or as individual services that may be purchased a la carte and integrated over time. The LightEdge Connected Office suite includes: hosted PBX voice services, hosted e-mail (Microsoft Exchange), hosted instant messaging and presence (Microsoft Office Communicator), hosted desktop faxing, and voice/web conferencing.
“I truly believe that our success in hosted Unified Communications comes from working closely with our small and medium-sized customers to solve for their needs,” said Jeff Springborn, president and COO of LightEdge Solutions. “We’ve created a solution to allow our customers to start out with a single service and grow into a fully integrated unified communications system as they need the additional capabilities. Flexibility and scalability are incredible talking points to small businesses in the current economy.”
According to Gartner – The early adopters of UCaaS have been SMBs. Such organizations are more open to working with the applications specialists that have been at the vanguard in offering a full UCaaS product suite. SMBs also have less restrictive technical and procurement requirements, resulting in a faster sales cycle.
Gartner uses the same six broad communications areas used to describe premises-based UC. They are as follows:
- Voice and telephony. This area includes fixed, mobile and softphone telephony, as well as the evolution of IP PBX functionality (provided virtually). It also includes live communications, such as video telephony.
- Conferencing. This area includes separate voice, videoconferencing and Web conferencing capabilities, as well as converged unified conferencing capabilities.
- Messaging. This area includes e-mail, which has become an indispensable business tool, voice mail and unified messaging (UM) in various forms.
- Presence and instant messaging (IM). These will play an increasingly central role in the next generation of communications. Presence services, in particular, are expanding to enable aggregation and publication of presence and location information from and to multiple sources. This enhanced functionality is sometimes called “rich presence.”
- Clients. Unified clients enable access to multiple communication functions from a consistent interface. These may have different forms, including thick desktop clients, thin browser clients and mobile PDA clients, as well as specialized clients embedded within business applications.
- Communication applications. This broad group of applications has directly integrated communication functions. Key application areas include consolidated administration tools, collaboration applications, contact center applications and notification applications. Eventually, other applications will be communication-enabled. When business applications are integrated with communication applications, Gartner calls these communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs). UCaaS offerings will provide the tools to enable the enterprise or third parties to develop such communications applications/CEBPs.
For details on LightEdge’s Hosted Unified Communications services, please contact LightEdge Sales at 877-771-3343, e-mail info@lightedge.com.
About LightEdge Solutions
LightEdge Solutions is a customer-centric managed services and cloud computing company devoted to solving the IT issues of small and medium-sized businesses nationwide. By utilizing our economies of scale, connections with world-class vendors and our own internal passion for engineering, LightEdge is able to offer our customers solutions fit their budget and allow them to concentrate on their core business, without worrying about the technology that supports it. For more information, visit www.www.lightedge.com.
LightEdge Solutions®, the LightEdge Solutions logo and Scale-on-Demand™ are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of LightEdge Solutions, Inc.
About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America” by Daniel O’Connell and Bern Elliot, December 20, 2010
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