As we cruise into the (hopefully sunny) long weekend, your friends at UC Today have once again gathered the hottest news from around the UC industry for your reading enjoyment.
This week was a mixed one for Microsoft Teams; it celebrated hitting a cool 145 million daily active users, while also experiencing an outage. Elsewhere, RingCentral released a whole host of video updates, Google Workspace drove its cloud growth and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg spoke with us about scaling BlueJeans.
Microsoft Teams Hits Record Number of Daily Users
Teams now boasts 145 million daily active users, according to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. This is the first update on Teams users since the tech titan revealed that it had 115 million active daily Teams users in October. The figure stood at just over 32 million before the pandemic.
“In markets where employees have returned to the workplace, including Australia, China, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, we have seen usage continue to grow,” he said.
“We are accelerating our innovation, adding over 300 features over the past year, including more than 100 new capabilities so far in 2021.″
Workspace Drives Google Cloud Growth
In a quarterly earnings call this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted its collaboration suite Workspace as a driving factor in its cloud growth, which surpassed $4bn in Q1.
The unit, which also houses Google Cloud Platform, saw sales rise 46 per cent year on year to $4.05bn, while losses narrowed from $1.7bn to $974m.
Workspace – formerly known as G Suite - was described by Pichai as the third of three components driving cloud growth.
"We continue to deliver helpful innovations to enable hybrid work with Google Workspace,” he stated.
“This includes digital tools for front-line workers like nurses and retail store workers, as well as new security offerings. These innovations have helped grow our revenue per seat and the number of seats in the last quarter.”
RingCentral Releases Host of New Video Updates
RingCentral has released a bunch of new features for its RingCentral Video platform, including presenter overlay, video virtual backgrounds, breakout rooms and picture-in-picture mode.
