November is coming to an end, and everyone is already getting excited about the festivities lined up for December. However, before you decorate your tree and hang your stockings, it might be worth checking out what’s going on in the world of communications, collaboration and customer experience. After all – the last week has been a great one!

Over the last seven days, we’ve delivered a number of exciting reports on everything from Cisco’s revenue decline, to the arrival of Microsoft Teams real-time direct routing.

If you haven’t had a chance to keep up with the news over the last week – here’s what we think you can’t afford to miss!

Are Storms Brewing in the Collab Landscape?

After months of collaboration and communications companies actually working well together, you might be surprised to hear that Cisco recently pointed out a significant flaw in Zoom’s system. The Cisco communications company posted a blog last week from their SVP/GM of the Team Collaboration Group, Sri Srinivasan. The blog highlighted the importance of Webex Teams being unwilling to compromise on security for its users.

At the same time, Sri also pulled attention to yet another verified weakness in the conferencing platform available from Zoom – one of the fastest-growing brands in the collaboration space. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Zoom discovery.

“Zoom Tax” Stops Organisations from Conferencing

Businesses of all sizes are being discouraged from rolling video conferencing options out to their meeting rooms by the costs of room licensing fees according to the COO of Lifesize, Michael Helmbrecht. The fees for conferencing room subscriptions, which he referred to as “Zoom tax” are having a serious impact on the growth of the video conferencing landscape and could be holding back potential growth.

As an alternative, Michael suggested using the new Dash room kit software from Lifesize, which can be implemented on an experimental basis, without any hidden costs. The Dash licensees allow organisations to register multiple meeting rooms to the Lifesize cloud service. You can learn more about this Zoom Rooms alternative in our article here.

Cisco Projects Revenue Decline for 2020

In the last few months, we’ve seen some exciting announcements from Cisco, including the new opportunity for businesses on Microsoft Teams to access meetings using Cisco technology. We’ve also seen the arrival of things like contextual collaboration, and exciting new upgrades in Cisco room tech. However, according to the latest financial report from Cisco, the company is expecting to lose revenue in 2020.