It’s been another cold but exciting week here at UC Today, with a slew of thrilling stories to sort through for all of our passionate journalists. As the year draws to a close, there’s still plenty of activity in the industry.
While some of our press releases have been positive, like the story about Five9 partnering with Google Cloud on a new solution for customer experience – others haven’t been nearly as joyful. For instance, both Fuze and BlueJeans have had lay-offs to deal with over the last week.
Here are some of the most important announcements that we think that you’ll want to hear about before you head into next week.
BlueJeans Lays off 40% of its Team
Christmas just got a lot colder for some of the staff at BlueJeans over the last week. With a valuation of around $727 million and pretty impressive revenues, you would think that the video conferencing and collaboration company would be celebrating a fantastic end to the year. However, just a couple of days ago, the CEO, Quentin Gallivan, announced a “strategic decision” to cut back on staff members and optimise resources for profitability.
According to reports, the company has removed 40% of its workforce of 500 people, leaving numerous people without employment as the holidays approach. Some people have commented on the bad timing of the recent layoffs. Others have suggested that the decision might have something to do with the growing demand for integrated tools like Microsoft Teams over singular products like BlueJeans for video conferencing. Read more here.
Fuze Loses a Quarter of its Global Workforce
It’s not just BlueJeans that are sending employees home with less than jolly spirits this holiday season, however. Fuze have also reportedly gotten rid of around 25% of its staff members worldwide. It seems like many individuals in the UC space are going to be starting 2020 with a job hunt.
The CEO of Fuze, Colin Doherty, has also been replaced with the company’s CFO, Brian Day, who published a blog post about the recent upheaval. The official announcement outlines a decision by the company to play to the “strengths in the enterprise” market going into the new year. There are a few references to “critical challenges” in the global organisation too, and a demand to help companies transition to the cloud. Like BlueJeans, Fuze seems to be focusing on reducing costs and increasing profits.
Cisco Updates Webex Meeting App
It’s not all bleak news in the unified communication, collaboration, and customer experience tech environments, of course. Cisco, one of the leaders in the collaboration marketplace, recently announced that it’s making some enhancements to the Cisco Webex Meetings experience. The changes to the technology come with the November update, named WBS39.10.
Some of the latest features to appear on Webex Meetings include live streaming in beta mode via Cisco partners with enterprise video. Additionally, Cisco is also introducing new technology that will allow companies to access improved audio quality in their meetings. You can even rely on the updated meeting experience to help you recover your video quality much faster after network issues occur too. You can learn all about the latest updates here.
What Happened at AWS re:Invent?
The holiday season might be here, but the events aren’t over yet. This week, Amazon launched its annual developer conference, AWS re:Invent. The conference is usually an excellent source of exciting news, with big partnership announcements and innovation breakthroughs to talk about each year. AWS re:Invent was held in Las Vegas Nevada and had a stage of global attendees present, each of which had access to more than 2,500 workshops, breakout sessions and hands-on experiences.
During AWS Re:Invent, Amazon spoke to developers about several topics, including the decision to partner with Verizon on 5G edge cloud computing. Additionally, AWS will also be looking at things like advanced analytics capabilities going forward. Get the full story here.
Five9 and Google Cloud Partner on Customer Experience
Finally, another piece of positive news to emerge this week came in the form of a partnership between Five9 and Google Cloud. Following the recent arrival of the AI contact centre solution from Google Cloud, Five9 built a new integration for the CCAI experience.
The combined solution between Five9 and Google’s intelligent contact centre aims to offer contact centre agents more context and support during customer conversations. The offering will provide assistance, guidance, and recommendations to agents as they speak to customers, boosting the chances of a positive customer experience and greater satisfaction levels. Learn more about the collaboration here.
What are your favourite stories from the last week? Let us know by joining the conversation in the comments below, on UC Advocates or on social media!
