Welcome back to our weekly roundup of the latest news from the unified comms industry
This week saw Gartner release this year’s much-anticipated Meeting Solutions Magic Quadrant, Google announced a bevy of new features for Workspace, and we announced our shortlidt for our very first UC Partner Awards!
Who Leads the Gartner Meeting Solution Magic Quadrant 2021?
The analyst house this week published its widely regarded annual rankings of the top Meeting Solutions vendors. The Leaders remain unchanged, with Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom retaining their spots in the quadrant.
However, there is a lot of movement (and one new face) in the Visionaries, Challengers, and Niche Players categories that indicate an exciting future ahead for the Meeting Solutions market.
RingCentral Rise Marks New Era in UCaaS
The cloud comm vendor’s new Rise offering provides partners with an integrated end-to-end managed service. It enables service providers to offer their own co-branded unified cloud comms solutions, including team messaging, video meetings, cloud phone system, and contact centre solutions.
It has been hailed as marking the beginning of a new era for the UCaaS industry by one analyst.
Elka Popova, Connected Work, vice president at Frost & Sullivan, stated:
“The Rise programme from RingCentral marks a new phase in the UCaaS industry’s evolution as it highlights an important shift in operator and vendor strategies”
“The programme meets the needs of businesses and partners that demand greater simplicity in terms of core feature set, packaging and pricing, while offering greater flexibility in terms of integrations with customer-specific workflows.”
Google Unveils Latest Updates to Workspace
The internet giant revealed the latest features for its flagship collaboration platform at its annual Google Next event this week.
Google is launching a new integration with Jira that will let users create tickets from within Chat and Spaces, rather than having to navigate to a different platform. It will also let them monitor the support.
The tech titan also revealed that it is integrating its AppSheet no-code app development platform into Gmail, allowing users to develop customised apps and automations regardless of their coding skills.
It also unveiled its new Work Safer programme, intended to help organisations and their partners collaborate securely in hybrid working environments.
Work Safer bundles Pixel phones, Workspace, Chrome OS, Chrome hardware and security.
Sunil Potti, General Manager of Google Cloud Security, said:
“Legacy productivity tools designed in the PC era were not architected for the new reality of real-time collaboration across a hybrid, highly-distributed and mobile-first workforce”
“With Work Safer, every small business, enterprise and public sector institution can have access to the cutting-edge security protections to make hybrid work safer.”
Verizon Unveils US’ ‘First Wireless Desk Phone’
Verizon unveiled its new One Talk T67LTE, proclaiming it to be the first wireless desk phone to be made available in the US.
The device is available only with Verizon’s One Talk service and is designed to support hybrid working.
The new desk phone can connect through a LAN, WAN or Wi-Fi connection, or through an ethernet cable. The LTE connection enables a “failover”, so should the user lose their broadband connectivity at their office, the phone will fall back to an LTE connection.
“No other wireless carrier has an embedded desk phone [like this],” Verizon’s Senior Product Manager, Derek Peabody told UC Today.
“I am aware that there are a few one-off solutions out there through third parties, but this is definitely the first carrier branded 4G/LTE connected desk phone in the United States”
UC Partner Award Finalists Revealed!
The shortlist for the inaugural UC Partner Awards has been unveiled!
These awards were designed to recognise the lengths that partners went to in helping their customers during one of the most tumultuous events in modern times, as well as those vendors innovating in the UC space to enable businesses to maintain productivity with a distributed workforce.
A panel of independent judges has been assembled to score the award entries and pick our finalists, giving these awards real value.
Register to attend the final and be the first to discover our winners on 4th November at 16:00 BST
