Welcome back to our weekly roundup of the latest news from the unified comms industry
This week saw Gartner release this year’s much-anticipated Meeting Solutions Magic Quadrant, Google announced a bevy of new features for Workspace, and we announced our shortlidt for our very first UC Partner Awards!
Who Leads the Gartner Meeting Solution Magic Quadrant 2021?
The analyst house this week published its widely regarded annual rankings of the top Meeting Solutions vendors. The Leaders remain unchanged, with Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom retaining their spots in the quadrant.
However, there is a lot of movement (and one new face) in the Visionaries, Challengers, and Niche Players categories that indicate an exciting future ahead for the Meeting Solutions market.
RingCentral Rise Marks New Era in UCaaS
The cloud comm vendor’s new Rise offering provides partners with an integrated end-to-end managed service. It enables service providers to offer their own co-branded unified cloud comms solutions, including team messaging, video meetings, cloud phone system, and contact centre solutions.
It has been hailed as marking the beginning of a new era for the UCaaS industry by one analyst.
Elka Popova, Connected Work, vice president at Frost & Sullivan, stated:
“The Rise programme from RingCentral marks a new phase in the UCaaS industry’s evolution as it highlights an important shift in operator and vendor strategies”
“The programme meets the needs of businesses and partners that demand greater simplicity in terms of core feature set, packaging and pricing, while offering greater flexibility in terms of integrations with customer-specific workflows.”
Google Unveils Latest Updates to Workspace
The internet giant revealed the latest features for its flagship collaboration platform at its annual Google Next event this week.
Google is launching a new integration with Jira that will let users create tickets from within Chat and Spaces, rather than having to navigate to a different platform. It will also let them monitor the support.
The tech titan also revealed that it is integrating its AppSheet no-code app development platform into Gmail, allowing users to develop customised apps and automations regardless of their coding skills.
It also unveiled its new Work Safer programme, intended to help organisations and their partners collaborate securely in hybrid working environments.
Work Safer bundles Pixel phones, Workspace, Chrome OS, Chrome hardware and security.
