Meeting solutions are real-time communication services with their associated devices that support live interactions between participants for internal and external collaboration, presentations, learning, training sessions and webinars. Meeting solutions power diverse use cases, such as one-on-one meetings, remote sales engagements, board meetings, telehealth sessions, remote banking and consulting services, to name just a few. Meeting solutions enable rich information sharing and interaction by combining audio and video, in-meeting chat, content and screen sharing, and visual collaboration and whiteboarding.
Gartner defines unified communications as a service (UCaaS) as a multitenant, subscription-based service. It is cloud-delivered, and it provides business telephony features; external, public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity that enables inbound or outbound calling; and collaboration features, such as messaging and meetings. UCaaS services can be consumed by end users with traditional handsets, desktop clients, meeting room systems and mobile apps. Gartner’s definition of meetings for the UCaaS market focuses on the capabilities for internal collaboration, work from home and external presentation meeting use cases only. Other specialized use cases — such as webinar, remote support, distance learning and training — are often available from UCaaS offerings, but are not mandatory for this research. These use cases are part of a separate market defined by Gartner (meeting solutions).