Welcome to our roundup of the headlines that have caused a buzz in the UC&C industry over the past seven days.
This week saw RingCentral become Mitel’s “exclusive UCaaS partner”, Slack’s Stuart Templeton opened up on the Salesforce Integration, and UC Today’s Tom Wright cast an eye over all the announcements from the most recent Microsoft Ignite.
RingCentral Teams Up with Mitel
Mitel has named RingCentral as its “exclusive” UCaaS partner.
The deal will include Mitel nudging its customer base of 35 million users towards RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP) platform, while Mitel’s private equity backers invest $200m in RingCentral.
RingCentral also announced the $650m acquisition of Mitel’s CloudLink technology – a cloud platform that enables migration from on-premises PBX to the cloud.
Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral CEO, stated:
“We are bringing together the best of Mitel and RingCentral to give customers the right communications and collaboration solutions for their needs”
“Given our maniacal customer-centric focus, we’re delighted to now be able to offer customers a flexible and differentiated digital transformation path.”
All the Major Teams News from Ignite
Aside from the big news that Microsoft was adding a voice channel to Dynamics 365, bringing mixed reality to Teams, and the introduction of Loop, there was still a lot of Teams news that emerged from last week’s Ignite event.
Microsoft updated us on when Teams Connect will be available, revealing that shared cross-company shared channels will launch in the first half of 2022, while users will be able to chat with people outside of their organisation via a personal account by the end of the year. Business users can already speak across businesses.
BlueJeans and GoTo were also announced as the latest additions to the Direct Guest Join programme, which allows users to join Teams Meetings from third-party meeting room kits and vice versa.
Teams webinars and chats also saw a number of features and updates announced, including a virtual green room and a “chat with self” function, respectively.
Wavenet Tops £100m in Revenue
Acquisitive Wavenet’s recent purchase of Excell Group has transformed it into a £100m-revenue business.
The acquisition of the London-based Avaya partner is the third for Wavenet in the span of a month, following on from ISL and NTS Communications.
Bill Dawson, Wavenet CEO, said of the purchase:
“Excell is the largest and most exciting acquisition we have made to date, bringing new services and a talented team into the Wavenet Group”
“This acquisition represents a huge step forward in our growth plans, giving us a stronger presence in the south of the UK and adding experience in growing service areas including flexible workplaces and cloud”
Slack UK Boss on Salesforce Merger
Stuart Templeton spoke with UC Today’s Tom Wright about the progress being made integrating with Salesforce, recently announced Slack innovations, such as Clips, and what the industry can expect from Slack in 2022.
UC Trends: Innovation
Launched last week, our UC Trends series continues to discuss the latest technologies and innovations in an ever-evolving industry.
This week we turned our eye to the topic of innovation and spoke with industry experts from Zoom, Talkdesk, Aircall, Bandwidth, BlueJeans, Content Guru & Theta Lake to discuss the customer trends they’ve experienced this year, and what the industry should expect from customers going into 2022.
