Niche Player: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
Privately held ALE is a spinoff of the former Alcatel-Lucent and a newcomer to this year's Magic Quadrant. Paris-based ALE does 100 percent of its business through partners, which are selling its core UCaaS offering, ALE Rainbow. Rainbow offers telephony, workstream collaboration, file sharing and mobility. Its meeting functionality is suited for small team collaboration. The platform supports contact center and third-party telephony via APIs, and Rainbow's API Hub lets partners and developers build in their own integrations.
Strengths: Rainbow's open architecture lets partners and customers build their own, customized solutions. The global platform supports 18 languages.
Weaknesses: Support in North America is limited, and the meeting function only supports up to 30 users at a time.