Gartner, Inc. positioned LightEdge Solutions, a premier provider of hosted unified communications and cloud computing services for small and medium-sized businesses, in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the 2010 Unified Communication as a Service North American report.
Hosted Unified Communications (News - Alert) providers are analyzed by the annual report based on ability to execute and completeness of vision including: market understanding, product strategy, overall viability, track record, innovation and vertical strategy.
All communication hardware and software, in traditional business communication models, is owned and maintained by the end-user with any “unification” coming though custom development. Through unified enterprise-grade platforms, all communications are delivered within a service provider’s network cloud.
Owing to the fact that UCaaS is utilized through a subscription model, businesses are able to take advantage 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 is the suite of hosted Unified Communications services and includes: hosted PBX (News - Alert) voice services, hosted e-mail, hosted instant messaging and presence, 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 (News - Alert) Solutions, in a press release. “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.”
SMBs, according to Gartner (News - Alert) have been the early adopters of UCaaS. 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.
In related news, Datapipe (News - Alert), a premier provider of managed services and infrastructure for IT and cloud computing, has been positioned as a Challenger in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting.
Deepika Mala is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Juliana Kenny