Welcome back to another weekly roundup of all the latest news here at UC Today.
It has once again been a busy week in the UC industry, as Cisco completed its acquisition of Slido this week, Slack’s SVP of EMEA spoke with us about fending off the competition in a crowded collaboration market. Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Workplace by Facebook now has seven million paid subscribers worldwide.
Cisco Completes Slido Deal
The comms giant has completed its acquisition of Slido for an undisclosed sum. The deal – which was first announced last December – will see Slido’s audience engagement tools, such as polls and quizzes, integrated into Webex.
“Slido technology brings robust capabilities to the Webex platform, enabling the kind of dynamic audience participation that is so important to an effective meeting experience,” stated Javed Khan, General Manager of Cisco Collaboration.
“For meeting participants that might be reluctant to ask a question or share their voice, Slido’s ability to display questions anonymously enables a higher degree of participation and feedback”
Slack’s EMEA Boss On Competition, Salesforce Deal and Hybrid Work
Johann Butting, Slack’s SVP EMEA, spoke candidly with UC Today about the challenges facing the UC space and how it differentiates itself in a field that has exploded with competition in the past year.
He also opened up about how Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of the messaging platform will be beneficial to Slack’s channel, which he admitted is “relatively undeveloped” and that it significantly boosts the opportunity available for partners.
Butting also mused on what the future of work will look like as a return to the office beckons. He explained how hybrid working is the way forward and organisations that don’t recognise this will struggle in a changing landscape:
“[Hybrid working] is here to stay because there is such an increase in efficiency for me and my customers that we would just be dumb to go back to the old way of working. Now I wonder why we didn’t do this years ago; we just needed the extra push from the pandemic to prove that this is possible.”
Workplace From Facebook Hits Record High
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, revealed that its collaboration platform Workplace From Facebook has hit a high of seven million paid subscribers. This figure is a 40 per cent increase on last year’s subscription number.
“We built Workplace as an internal version of Facebook to run our own company, and it was so useful we started letting other organizations use it too, including everyone from Spotify to Starbucks to the World Health Organization,” he said.
