Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service for the fifth year in a row 

We are honored to announce that Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)—this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve received this recognition. We are particularly excited and humbled to have been placed highest on the ability to execute axis and furthest on the completeness of vision axis. 

The report evaluates Microsoft for Microsoft Teams which provides telephony, meetings, and messaging. We believe this recognition values the impact of our continued investment in our UCaaS offerings and Teams more broadly—from foundational work to drive the availability and reliability of our services to the introduction of advanced intelligence and AI.  

We’ve shipped more than 635 new capabilities into Teams over the past year, including significant innovations in chat and collaboration, meetings and calling, apps and workflow, and admin and security. Teams is built with next-generation technologies to provide a unified experience for your communication and collaboration needs.

The vision of Microsoft Teams is to be your smart place to work, where people can achieve more  together. Over the past year, we’ve demonstrated our ability to execute on this promise by introducing Microsoft Teams Premium—bringing together advanced capabilities across Teams to help business leaders address new opportunities and adapt to a new way of work by making your collaboration more intelligent, protected, and engaging. 

The smart place to work: Teams Premium

With more than 10,000 customers in the first eight months, Teams Premium has become essential to how people get work done every day. Teams Premium provides several built-in and automated AI capabilities, specific to Teams, that streamline how users can begin to harness the power of AI to optimize their collaboration and meeting experience. These capabilities work hand-in-hand with Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Teams, your AI assistant at work, to complete our vision of intelligent productivity.  

Intelligent productivity, so you can focus on what matters 

Teams Premium offers out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities that are easy to start with to help you save time and effort on routine tasks so you can focus on higher value work. With intelligent recap, AI-generated notes are automatically delivered after each meeting to help you focus on the discussion, not on capturing action items. Chapters and topics divide meeting recordings into sections so it’s easy to find the content you would like to review. Personalized timeline and speaker markers help you navigate to the parts of a meeting recording most relevant to you.  

Intelligent recap supports several languages so more teams can collaborate naturally and get the corresponding AI-generated notes and AI-generated tasks afterward. Teams Premium also offers live translated meeting captions and transcripts during the meeting to further remove language barriers and simplify collaboration. 

The automated summaries provided by intelligent recap are a great first step on your generative AI journey with Copilot in Teams, which gives users the on-demand ability to ask any question about the meeting during and after, to deepen your insights and progress your next steps.  

Advanced protection to meet your organization’s unique needs 

Collaboration must be not only easy to conduct across multiple channels, it must also meet the business needs for security and control. From its launch, Teams Premium has helped customers work more securely with advanced protection and customized Teams management. Custom watermarking over screen shares and video feeds helps deter leaks of sensitive information and intellectual property. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) adds an additional layer of privacy in meetings so that only the participants can hear or see the communication. Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat, limiting who can record, and sensitivity labels help safeguard confidential information.  

Recently we launched a new category of Teams Premium capabilities that empowers IT admins with advanced controls to manage internal communications for sensitive accounts as well as deep insights into both application performance and external collaboration behaviors, to help ensure quality experiences and mitigate risks.  

Richer engagements for better business outcomes 

The core of effective collaboration is engagement. Teams Premium helps create deeper engagements with your customers and employees with personalized, branded experiences, to grow your business—from nurturing new clients in one-on-one virtual appointments to hosting webinars for prospects to delivering large-scale town halls.  

Infuse your brand into every stage of your interaction—from the meeting invitation, to the join page, and throughout the meeting. After your event, our recently launched engagement analytics help meeting and webinar organizers understand attendee interaction to drive the right level of follow-ups with attendees and improve outcomes for future engagements.  

Unlike other meeting and collaboration tools, Teams Premium brings these advanced capabilities and more together in one unified solution, reducing costs and making it simple to license and deploy. Get started for free for 30 days or buy before June 30, 2024, for just USD7 per user per month—30% off the standard USD10 pricing. 

Try or buy Teams Premium today! 

We believe Gartner recognition is a result of the vision and effort of so many at Microsoft, but we also want to take a moment to thank our customers and partners for making this possible. Your feedback, ideas, and collaboration continually inspire us to raise the bar and shape Teams to better serve you. 

Learn more

While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished with the dedication and cooperation of our customers and partners, we remain focused on delivering innovative communication and collaboration experiences in Teams. 

• Learn more about Teams Premium.
• Learn how Microsoft Teams helps you meet, call, collaborate and chat with colleagues, customers, and partners. 
• Read the full 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Services (UCaaS) report. 

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, 28 November 2023, Rafael Benitez et. Al. 

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