AT&T Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing

Dallas, Texas.- AT&T* today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned it in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2009 “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing” report.

Gartner evaluated AT&T Connect® and positioned AT&T in the Leaders Quadrant in its annual review of Web conferencing and collaboration services for businesses. AT&T Connect unifies audio conferencing, Web conferencing and video conferencing within a single, company-wide conferencing and collaboration tool. It provides an effective foundation for unified communications with its integrated telephony, broad range of online events, ability to serve both internal and external meetings from a single interface, and flexible access for mobile and remote users. AT&T Connect easily fosters strong global collaboration with a fast return on investment.

According to Gartner, “Enterprise decisions on Web conferencing have to align the types of meetings to be supported and the number of participants (internal, external or both) with the appropriate deployment option for specific meetings.”1

“We are delighted to be recognized by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant report on Web conferencing,” said Frank Zvi, vice president, AT&T Unified Communications. "AT&T Connect uniquely blends on premises and hosted capabilities to address all types of meetings. As unified communications introduces new complexities to conferencing deployments, AT&T Connect offers customers a way to fully address global conferencing and business requirements, without having to deploy separate on-premises and hosted tools.”

AT&T Connect includes fully-integrated audio conferencing, Web conferencing and video conferencing with the following capabilities:

* Converged public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) audio (PC). Integrates PSTN and VoIP-based audio to ensure better meeting access for all types of internal and external office, remote and mobile participants.
* Integration with AT&T’s global IP audio conferencing. Creates a unique combination of global, scalable audio and web conferencing, delivered as one unified solution. This includes hybrid on-premise / hosted capabilities where customers want to extend the benefits of their IP PBX investments for on-net conferencing that integrates with a fully hosted service for on-demand capacity, failover and reach.
* Integrated communications and collaboration. Integrates with Microsoft OCS, IBM SameTime unified communications solutions.
* Wider breadth of features. Meets the needs of business groups with Web meetings, teleconferences, multipoint video conferences, webcasts and seminars, virtual classrooms, recording and archiving.
* High performance and reliability. Uses an intelligent, distributed architecture to ensure optimal performance for all users regardless of location and with less demand on network and PBX resources. This provides intelligent voice quality monitoring of user experience and flexible controls for networking and compliance.
* Meets diverse IT requirements. Fully-managed hosted, premises or hybrid service. This integrates with enterprise IT and security systems, legacy and IP PBXs and application infrastructures. Multilevel authentication and usage reporting.