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It’s been an exciting couple of weeks here in the Unified Communications and Collaboration space, with plenty of stories to talk about from Twilio, Logitech, Slack, and big reveals from Avaya Engage 2020.
RingCentral, RingCentral, leaders in the world of communication, collaboration, and contact centre technology are this month’s headline sponsor. Across March we’re covering all things about Contact Centre’s and CCaaS, so be sure to check out all our latest features and news stories by visiting our CCaaS category on the UC Today website.
If you’ve missed out on any of our most exciting stories from the past few week – here are some of the top stories.
Rounding Up Avaya ENGAGE 2020
One of the marketplace leaders in communication and collaboration solutions, Avaya, recently held their annual “ENGAGE” event this year. The theme of the conference was centred around transformation, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the meaningful changes that Avaya has been making lately.
Some of the biggest updates revealed at the ENGAGE event included an introduction to new partner solutions to help Avaya take its solutions to the market. Additionally, Avaya also announced an upcoming CCaaS product for 2020, designed to give companies access to the power of pure cloud in the contact centre. The future for Avaya certainly looks bright.
IBM Delivers Slack Accounts to Remaining Employees
You might have seen rumours floating around in the UC space that IBM has ramped up its relationship with collaboration company Slack. 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 analyst 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.
3 Technologies Changing Industries in 2020
We love getting industry insights from marketplace leaders here at UC Today. We had a fantastic guest blog published by the VP of Product Management and Tech Solutions for Spectralink, Andrew Duncan. Andrew shared his thoughts on the technology that is changing industries around the world in 2020 and beyond.
In his intriguing piece, Duncan discussed the evolution of the Internet of Things, and the rising demand for connected devices, as well as the growth of the cloud environment. Andrew also discussed the importance of enterprise mobility, and what being connected on the go will mean to businesses in the years to come. See the full guest post.
