Even as companies settle into the workplace decisions they’ve made for today’s post-pandemic realities, IT leaders must continue assessing whether they’ve got the optimal mix of communications and collaboration tools for users—i.e., the right features at the right price, in the packaging that works best for them.
As Metrigy consistently finds in its global buyer-side MetriCast market forecast studies, cost is typically the top reason companies cite for changing up their tool vendors. Obtaining new features is a top driver as well. This could be a mismatch between desired advanced features and a vendor’s roadmap, or perhaps a change in strategy from point solutions to integrated services, for example.
Whether an IT buyer looking to make a technology change or a provider needing to understand shifting tides, Metrigy delivers necessary insight in its MetriCast Service. This service comprises our MetriCast market forecast (as noted above), our MetriRank vendor ratings, and our MetriStar vendor awards.
We’ll be publishing our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast:2023 market forecast report shortly, and MetriRank reports for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and SIP trunking will follow this quarter and next. But today the big news that we’re sharing is the vendors that have earned recognition as a Workplace Collaboration MetriStar 2023 Top Provider Award winner.
In determining MetriStar Award winners, we use customer ratings of providers along with quantitative metrics correlating the use of a vendor’s products and services with measurable business success, as provided by their customers. The MetriStar Top Provider Award goes to those companies that get at or above-average customer sentiment ratings and whose customers have achieved high business success. In the case of the Workplace Collaboration MetriStar, these ratings and success metrics come from the 1,418 companies that participated in our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast: 2023 study on workplace collaboration.
This year, we awarded MetriStar Top Provider Awards in seven technology areas. (Note that our WC MetriCast 2023 study included an eighth category, UC performance management, but no top providers surfaced.) Those technologies, and award winners in each, are:
- Headsets – Bose, Cisco, EPOS, JBL, Microsoft
- Meeting apps – BlueJeans, Google, GoTo
- Room video systems – Huddly
- SIP trunking – AT&T, Bandwidth
- Team collaboration – Google, Slack
- UCaaS – 8×8, Google, Microsoft, Zoom
- UC administration management – Unimax
These 18 winners rose to the top in ratings of more than 50 providers from MetriCast study participants. In addition, we’ll recognize a number of vendors that achieved either high customer ratings, or whose customers achieved high business success.
Irwin Lazar, head of our workplace collaboration practice, provides a ton more detail on this award program, the customer sentiment scores and business metrics for each category, and which providers came up as winners of Top Business Success and Top Customer Sentiment awards, during his Workplace Collaboration MetriStar webinar. Listen on demand and get all you need to know for scoping out providers.
