It’s time for another great roundup of news from the Unified Communication space.
We’re now in mid-March, and many companies, and customers alike are looking back on the events of last year when many countries first went into lockdown. The world has come a long way since then, particularly in the communication space.
Over the last week, we’ve reported on some exciting stories, offered insights into some of the latest features of your favourite UC&C tools, and we even provided a full rundown of Microsoft Ignite 2021. If you didn’t have a chance to check out all of the reports from the last week, don’t worry. We’ve put together our top list of must-see stories here.
Zoom Launches Lawsuit Against RingCentral
A clash of the titans is on the cards in the UC and collaboration space. Zoom is suing RingCentral over something it refers to as a “classic bait and switch” for customers. The lawsuit revolves around the long-standing connection between RingCentral and Zoom, which has allowed the former to use Zoom video conferencing technology in its offering. RingCentral has launched its own video solution recently and claims to be moving customers away from the Zoom-powered product.
However, Zoom says that RingCentral is still selling its product, despite Zoom trying to terminate the collaboration in July 2020. Although the details on the lawsuit are a little blurry, it’s clear that Zoom wants to put an end to RingCentral selling its technology.
RingCentral has since been awarded a temporary restraining order against Zoom, allowing it to continue selling the Meetings product.
Verizon Introduces New Microsoft Teams Solution
Leading collaboration and communication solution, BlueJeans by Verizon, announced an update to its Gateway for Teams offering recently. The BlueJeans gateway provides companies with an opportunity to expand their collaboration efforts to employees wherever they might be. Microsoft also announced Verizon is one of the first partners of the Microsoft Operator Connect Platform.
The Microsoft Teams Operator Connect System and BlueJeans gateway are two significant steps forward in Verizon’s strategy to drive better collaboration and communication experiences for the future workplace. The President of Global Enterprise for Verizon commented on the release, noting that modern companies are more in need of the right collaborative environments today than ever.
Teams Recovers from Major Outage
On 15 March 2021, everyone’s favourite collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, hit a massive snag. The Teams environment was hit with an outage that affected multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services across the ecosystem. Microsoft released a statement about the issue, and responded to customers on Twitter, noting that the worldwide problem was caused by a change to the solution’s authentication system.
