January is finally over, and the month of love is upon us.
So, what does this mean for the arenas of communication, collaboration, and customer experience? More news to get your heart beating faster – of course.
To start February, we’ve seen new announcements from the leading communications company, Cisco, celebrating its Cisco Live event. Recent reports have revealed that UC cloud adoption is growing rapidly, and more companies are jumping into CPaaS than ever before.
If you’ve missed out on any of our most exciting stories from this past week – here are some of the highlights to keep you on track.
Microsoft Patches Embarrassing Bug That Downed Teams
For many businesses, Monday mornings often start the same way – checking emails and logging into Microsoft Teams. Unfortunately, this week, that schedule was thrown out of the window, as thousands of people faced error messages when they attempted to check their Teams app. Just after 9 am EST, Microsoft confirmed that the Teams app was experiencing outages.
A little later, the company noted that the reason for the problem was that they had forgotten to renew a crucial security certificate. Though Microsoft repaired the issue quite quickly, it was an embarrassing fumble for one of the leading tech brands, and a problem that left countless companies without access to their collaboration tools.
Rounding Up Cisco Live!
Cisco held its exciting Cisco Live! event in Barcelona at the end of January this year, providing an excellent opportunity for buyers, partners, and others to catch up on the latest innovation from the collaboration giant. Just some of the announcements from this annual event included the news that the Webex Assistant that would be able to speak Spanish soon, and that Cisco would be bringing more AI to everything from IVR to chatbots.
Cisco also revealed a bunch of exciting new improvements to the Webex Contact Centre for enterprise companies, which will now support up to 24,000 agents at a time through Cisco’s “Flex Plan.” What’s more, we learned about the arrival of things like searchable meeting transcripts, improved huddle rooms, and patched bugs too. Here’s everything you might have missed.
The Latest Cisco Contact Centre Updates
On the second day of the Cisco Live event this year, the company introduced attendees to some thrilling changes within the contact centre landscape. Cisco told us about the upcoming integrations it would be embracing with Google’s Cloud Contact Centre AI, and the Voicea brand. These collaborations will help people using the Cisco landscape to take their contact centre environments to the next level.
The collaboration between Cisco and Voicea creates a new Webex AI assistant that provides full transcripts and summaries of voice conversations. On the other hand, the integration with Google Cloud Contact Centre AI helps to unlock new conversational AI opportunities in the customer experience landscape.
UC Cloud Adoption to Grow in 2020
We’ve seen a lot of evidence over recent years that businesses far and wide are ready to embrace the flexibility and scalability of cloud technology. Now that the new decade is here, it seems as though the demand for cloud UC is bound to grow even further. In a recent guest blog, Steven Johnson of Ingate Systems shared his insights into the evolving cloud UC environment.
Steven highlighted the expanding need for a cloud-based voice in an environment affected by digital transformation. He also drew focus to the “many flavours of cloud” and how interoperability is bound to be a crucial consideration in the years ahead. Check out the full guest blog here.
RingCentral Explains the Benefits of CPaaS
CPaaS has emerged as one of the most valuable as-a-service technologies in the communication and collaboration landscape of late. This technology ensures that businesses of all sizes and backgrounds can make the most out of their communication stack, without having to rely on one-size-fits-all tools. VP for Product Platform, David Lee of RingCentral, shared his thoughts on the importance of leveraging CPaaS.
According to David, companies need to consider CPaaS with a focus on intent. It’s important to ensure that IT can effectively manage and monitor a full CPaaS environment if companies want this innovation to thrive. Check out Lee’s thoughts here.
What are your favourite stories from this week? Let us know in the comments or join the conversation on social media – as usual!
Don’t forget to continue climbing to the top of our UC Summit too – for plenty of exciting insights and knowledge from the UC&C space.
