David Chao was kind enough to publish Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing on his Web Conferencing Blog. Go take a look and read it there. Note that the results are based on research as of November 2011 – Not 2012.
The Magic Quadrant concept has been a massive success for Gartner over the years. It also drives vendors up the wall. Gartner has many criteria for inclusion/exclusion of vendors and products. You have to look far down the writeup to see why some are mentioned and others are not.
I find this quadrant frustrating because it mixes and matches several different things in an attempt to be all-encompassing. I find the results hard to use for practical purchase decisions.
I don’t mind Gartner’s look at the vendor’s business strengths as a company. The “Ability to Execute” axis is not a bad guide to overall vendor strength and stability. But “Completeness of Vision” is simply a mess in this case. Gartner lists their own requirements for functionality, which are a subset of web conferencing features and include no guide to relative weighting. They throw together products intended for peer-level collaborative use, structured one-to-many lecture purposes, and eLearning. Their write-up doesn’t even mention scheduling, event registration, or attendee communications – to pick some obvious areas that are hypercritical in many webinar use cases.
So take it with a grain of salt. But a big thank you to David for sharing the research.
