RingCentral Celebrates Largest Ever UCaaS Deal
RingCentral reported its largest-ever UCaaS deal during its most recent earnings call.
During the call, RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis outlined that the vendor had sold 40,000 seats in an eight-figure deal to a Fortune 500 retailer whose sales exceed $20 billion.
“I’m excited to share that in Q1, we signed our largest UCaaS seat deal ever,” said Shmunis.
With RingCentral, this customer will be able to address their main pain points, which include dropped call, long hold times, inadequate call reporting and lack of advanced voice features. In this megadeal win, RingCentral will be replacing their legacy solution, Skype for Business, demonstrating our ability to win against Teams Phone while operating within the Team’s ecosystem.”
Additionally, to cap off a positive quarter for RingCentral, total revenues grew by nine percent year-over-year in Q1 to $584 million, above the high end of the business’s outlook.
8×8 Looks To CCaaS And CPaaS For Growth Over ‘Stodgy’ UCaaS
8×8 looks set to focus more on CCaaS and CPaaS products and services over UCaaS, seemingly asserting they represent better growth avenues.
During the Q&A portion of its Q4 2024 earnings call, 8×8 CEO Samuel Wilson was asked about the company’s CCaaS pipeline compared to its UCaaS outlook. Wilson noted growth and momentum in 8×8’s contact centre and CPaaS business but was cautious about UCaaS, describing it as a “tough market” and saying later on in the call that 8×8 needed to grow beyond “being known as that stodgy UCaaS company”.
“Well, contact centre business, we’ve been seeing more growth,” Wilson said. “It’s hard, there’s a little bit of a fuzz on that call. Contact centre, we’ve definitely been seeing solid momentum, particularly when we think about the CPaaS partnership around it, the add-on products, those kinds of things. And then UCaaS, it’s a tough market out there.”
Celebrating 8×8’s Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams solution, Wilson also stressed how appreciative of Teams 8×8 was and appeared to reference Zoom’s competitor product in the process: “We love Teams, and I think Teams is a much better product than those guys that start with a Z anyway.”
Microsoft Reportedly Building Major New AI Model Rivalling OpenAI, Google
Microsoft is reportedly building a large new AI model that could potentially compete with OpenAI and Google’s most advanced tech.
As first reported by The Information, Microsoft is developing an in-house AI language model internally known as MAI-1. This model is allegedly sophisticated enough to rival those produced by Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft’s prominent AI partner, OpenAI.
The Information’s sources said that MAI-1 will be overseen by the recently hired Mustafa Suleyman, the Google DeepMind co-founder and former CEO of AI startup Inflection, who is now known as Microsoft AI CEO.
The precise plan behind the model has not yet been determined and will seemingly depend on its initial reception and performance. The Information added that Microsoft may provide a preview of the new model as early as its Build developer conference this month.
Alianza Reveals CLOUDEDGE Legacy Voice Migration to Cloud
Alianza has introduced its new access control solution, CLOUDEDGE, to provide telecommunications service providers (telcos) with a way to streamline legacy voice migration to the cloud.
According to the cloud communications platform, it provides telcos with a “low-risk path” to simplifying operations, increasing network management efficiencies, and speeding up innovation.
Telcos have previously been able to set up UCaaS cloud services and move softswitch services to the cloud, but CLOUDEDGE sets itself apart by creating a path to the cloud for even the most complex legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructure migrations without any meaningful risk to services.
Alianza’s related press release explains some of the difficulties that CLOUDEDGE will help to solve:
For more than a decade, telcos have faced challenges in managing legacy services side-by-side with the development and delivery of net-new capabilities. These realities undermined revenue growth and left telcos vulnerable to competitive threats from over-the-top (OTT) competitors that were not constrained by the need to maintain network infrastructure, optimize service reliability, and deliver full-service capabilities, often in adherence with regulatory mandates.”
