We’re honored to announce that Microsoft has, once again, been recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Worldwide. This is the sixth year we’ve received this recognition and we’re thrilled to be positioned highest in the ability to execute and furthest on completeness of vision axes.
We believe this recognition highlights our commitment to delivering AI-powered communication and collaboration experiences in Microsoft Teams. We’re constantly finding new ways to help our customers by giving them the tools they need to succeed. Whether it’s saving time on routine tasks or having more purposeful meetings and calls, AI is completely changing the way we work. With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams, we’re supercharging productivity and collaboration.
So, when we get recognized like this, it’s a nod to all the hard work we’ve put into making sure Teams is the smart place to work, for your entire workforce, and the trust our customers and partners have in us to deliver on this vision. Thank you for your continued support and partnership. Together, we’re shaping the future of unified communications.
Microsoft named a Leader
Gartner recognizes Microsoft in the 2024 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide.
Building a foundation for the future
Teams has become a mission-critical application for keeping your organization connected. We take this responsibility seriously and understand how valuable reliability, survivability, and simple deployment are to your organization. The innovation below represents only a fraction of the investments we’ve delivered over the past year to the core fundamentals of Teams.
- Financially-backed 99.999% service level agreement: As a signal of our commitment to deliver calling that works when you need it, we recently increased our Microsoft Teams Phone service level agreement to reflect a 99.999% uptime guarantee, which covers Microsoft Teams Calling Plans, Teams Phone, and Microsoft Teams Audio Conferencing.
- Survivable calling capabilities: We’re continuing to expand survivable calling capabilities made possible with the Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) capabilities. SBA now supports call transfer, forwarding, and incoming calls from call queues or auto attendants in the event of a network outage.
- Shared calling: With shared calling, a single phone number and calling plan can be shared by a group of users—whether it’s a team of 10 people in a small office or 10,000 users in an enterprise department. Admins can easily enable users to make and receive calls in Teams, saving deployment and management time.
- Windows Autopilot for Microsoft Teams Rooms: This new integration with Windows Autopilot and auto-login of Teams Rooms on Windows offers low-friction provisioning that will enable devices to sign in to the account associated with the Autopilot device seamlessly, reducing the time it takes IT admins to deploy Teams Rooms from days to minutes.
Making communication smarter
Teams is where more than 320 million people connect and collaborate to get things done. Intelligence is infused throughout Teams to help you save time and improve your communication skills. Our customers tell us Microsoft 365 Copilot has changed the way they work and they’re seeing great value in Teams. In this past year, we introduced several enhancements to help you make the most of your calls, meetings, and chats.
- Intelligent call recap: One of the best AI features for meetings is now available for calling. Intelligent call recap can provide AI-powered insights and recaps of your VoIP and public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls in Teams. With Copilot in Teams Phone, you can further enhance your experience with the ability to ask specific questions about the call.
- Queues app: The Queues app is a new collaborative call management solution that gives agents and leads the tools to efficiently handle customer calls within Teams and optimize call queue performance with real-time and historical reporting.
- Copilot in Teams chat compose box: Prompt Copilot to adjust your message and provide a custom rewritten version. Copilot can adjust your message to add a call to action or generate a new message with a prompt by typing just a few words in Teams chat.
- Copilot can reason over meeting transcript and meeting chat: Based on customer feedback, we’ve enhanced the Copilot in meeting experience. Copilot in meetings now provides information and insights from the meeting chat in addition to the meeting transcript.
Reimaging the AI-powered workplace
AI innovation is already improving how you work; improving where you work is the next opportunity. Reimagining the workplace to support true flexibility requires technology to bridge the physical and digital divide. Together, Teams and Microsoft Places unlock new levels of coordination, modernization, and insight to make connecting with coworkers even easier.
- Places: Now available in public preview, Places reimagines flexible work with AI to make coordinating in-office time and connecting with coworkers even easier. Coordinate where work happens, modernize how you connect, and optimize the effectiveness of your workplace with valuable space insights.
- Speaker recognition: Speaker recognition identifies who in the room said what and captures it in the meeting transcript. This then allows Copilot and intelligent recap to provide query responses that accurately attribute what different in-person participants said during a meeting.
- Automatic camera switching for IntelliFrame: Using AI to determine and select the optimized view of each person in a meeting room, this capability compares multiple video sources and selects the best view of each person in a meeting room to provide remote participants with a clear view.
- Bring your own device (BYOD): We continue to invest in BYOD rooms with a range of new Teams features designed to enhance experiences for end users in these spaces and empower IT admins to better understand their spaces. Features such as shared display mode ensure that you are in full control of the content you share to a display in a BYOD meeting room.
Learn more about Teams and Copilot
While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished with the support and collaboration of our customers and partners, we remain focused on delivering innovation to help you harness the power of Teams and AI—to lead the way in this new world of work.
- Start using Copilot today. Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device.
- Explore Teams Premium and start a free trial today.
- Read the full 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Services (UCaaS) report.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Pankil Sheth, Megan Fernandez, Christopher Trueman, Rafael Benitez, 7 October 2024
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