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.
UC Awards Are Back!
New co-host, new website, new categories – this year’s UC Awards are back and bigger than ever!
Applications open from today and deadline for entry is 14 June and alongside old favourite categories, such as ‘Best CPaaS platform’ and ‘Best UCaaS provider’ we’ve added in some new categories to acknowledge the hard work of the UC industry over the pandemic. New categories include ‘Best use of AI’ and ‘Best Work from Home product’.
The virtual event will be held 29 July so get your entries in now for what will be our best awards show yet!
Experts Wade in On Making the Office Hybrid Ready
Industry specialists from Konftel, Poly, Crestron and Pexip gathered to take part in our round table on Meeting Room solutions and how organisations should be preparing themselves for a return to the office.
The experts revealed how they are helping customers create safe working spaces for an office return, the most sought-after technology for collaborative spaces and mulled over how the post-COVID meeting room experience will differ from what we’re used to.
If you want to have your say on this week’s UC news, get involved on our social media platforms!
