It’s been another exciting week here in the Unified Communications and Collaboration space, with plenty of stories to talk about from Twilio, Logitech, Slack, and countless others.
We’ve been attending events like ISE to see what’s happening next in the video and audio landscape, while also making time for discussions with industry leaders too. If you haven’t had a chance to check out some of the latest stories, we’ve covered at UC Today – don’t panic.
As usual, we’re bringing you our list of must-see content for the last week, so that you can stay ahead of the curve.
IBM Delivers Slack Accounts to Remaining Employees
First things first, you might have seen rumours floating around in the UC space that IBM has ramped up its relationship with collaboration company Slack, this week. While that’s undoubtedly true – the amount of new seats that Slack can claim from IBM has been a little inflated by some reporters. The company isn’t adding 350,000 new seats to its roster. Instead, the actual number of positions added recently was just under 50,000.
While nearly 50,000 new customers is nothing to be sniffed at, there has been a lot of confusion in the industry recently. Fortunately, Slack clarified its relationship with IBM for us in an email to the UC Today team. According to Slack, IBM now has over 300,000 users on the platform in total and is planning on deploying the collaboration app company-wide.
Should Twilio be a UCaaS Vendor?
Towards the beginning of February, Twilio shared its fourth-quarter earnings for the 2019 financial period. Although the company surpassed analysts expectations, the value of the Twilio’s CPaaS stocks fell by around 7%. That’s because Twilio reported a lower-than-expected set of guidance numbers heading into 2020.
Principal Analyst and Founder of ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala, said that the problem might have something to do with the fact that Twilio has been “overvalued” for quite some time now. He told UC Today that although Twilio is still growing at an impressive rate, he believes that the company would accomplish a lot more by entering the market as a UCaaS vendor and changing its structure to match something like Vonage/Nexmo.
Rounding Up ISE: The Highlights
Our very own Rob Scott had the pleasure of attending the ISE event (Integrated Systems Europe), this year. The conference is one of the most exciting environments in the world for people interested in audio and video technology, and it also has a dedicated UC hall. Rob noted a number of trends when perusing the content at ISE this year, including a rising demand for service management tools as part of the video conferencing and collaboration stack.
Both Logitech and Poly were introducing new service management tools at their booths for 2020, though each had a slightly different approach in mind. Additionally, many of the businesses at ISE seemed to be passionate about embracing a “video first” culture in the workplace, with everyone from Google, to Zoom touting the benefits of video communication. Find out more here.
