Slack Reinforces Its Focus on Productivity with the Announcement of Slack Canvas

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Slack Canvas fulfills the truest potential of hybrid work tools – increasing productivity.

• Productivity has been a focal point at Slack, and that places it in an enviable position.

Slack has announced Slack Canvas, which is scheduled to launch in 2023. Slack Canvas supplements channels, which are the centerpiece of the Slack platform. Slack defines channels as repositories that centralize people, information, and tools, thus facilitating collaboration. Any channel can have a dedicated, customizable canvas associated with it. Canvases provide a permanent place to organize and store resources that can be shared with and updated by a team.

RingCentral’s ‘Customer Service Essentials’ Allows Smaller Businesses to Test the Contact Center Waters

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Customer Service Essentials reflects a growing propensity among vendors for combining contact center and unified communications capabilities in a single offer.

• Customer Service Essentials lets smaller businesses dip their toe in the contact center waters, but it is merely a pricing bundle at its core.

RingCentral recently launched Customer Service Essentials, a contact center offering targeted at the small office/home office (SOHO) and small business markets. Customer Service Essentials bundles RingCentral’s flagship ‘MVP (Message, Video, and Phone)’ offer and Live Reports, which provides real-time call center performance data.

UC&C Platforms Are Becoming Homogenized

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Three forces are driving homogenization of UC&C platforms: common features, a continuous surfeit of bells and whistles, and interoperability between competing platforms.
• The need for in-office and remote workers to communicate and collaborate – and thus demand for UC&C platforms – will remain robust in the hybrid world.

Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) platforms are becoming homogenized. There are three forces driving this phenomenon: (1) a common set of features has emerged from the major players, including meetings, chat, calling, and events (some players have created an augmented core by also including contact centers and AI); (2) competitors are continually and rapidly complementing common features with a surfeit of bells and whistles (e.g., live reactions such as likes, enhanced lighting for video feeds, and polling); and (3) interoperability between platforms and cooperation between competitors are fast becoming the norm.

8×8 and Genesys Announce an Integration, but There Is Much More Than Meets the Eye

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• The integration enables collaboration between contact center agents and subject matter experts throughout their organizations.
• The announcement reinforces trends around coopetition, contact centers, and linkage between UCaaS and CCaaS.

8×8 and Genesys announced that 8×8’s ‘Work’ now features integration with Genesys’ ‘Cloud CX.’ 8×8 Work includes enterprise voice, video meetings, and team chat capabilities. Cloud CX is a contact center offer that works across phone, email, chat, text, and social channels. The integration will enable contact center agents to collaborate with subject matter experts across an organization. Agents will access subject matter experts through a company directory, while those experts can indicate their availability to respond to customer inquiries. Agents will access both offers through a single sign-on. Both offers can be downloaded from either vendor’s app store.

Cisco’s Webex Adoption Methodology Is an Antidote to Competitive Homogeneity

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Three market drivers are causing the lines between competitors’ UC&C platforms to blur.
• Facilitating platform adoption is a meaningful source of competitive differentiation.

The lines are blurring between competitors’ UC&C platforms. Feature sets are beginning to look similar.  Interoperability between disparate hardware and between disparate software is becoming more commonplace.  Acquisitions and partnerships are bringing functionality from opposing players under one roof.

Google Addresses Microsoft and Shadow IT with Workspace Essentials Starter Edition

Summary Bullets:

G. Willsky

• Essentials Starter parallels Microsoft Teams Essentials launched last December.

• Essentials Starter is consistent with the shadow IT movement that has recently gained great momentum.

Google has announced a free version of Google Workspace for business users named Google Workspace Essentials Starter Edition. In addition to being one of the most recent enhancements to Google Workspace, the offer is noteworthy for how it is positioned in the market.

RingCentral Rise Helps Service Providers Bring Co-Branded UCaaS Offers to Market

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• RingCentral Rise represents a significant investment in the company’s relationship with service provider partners.
• Rise is innovative in the way it combines technology, managed services, and a channel program to create co-branded UCaaS offers.

RingCentral has solidified its position in the cloud-based collaboration market.  This has been largely driven by the expansion of its portfolio beyond its flagship chat service (Glip) to include conferencing, team collaboration, voice, and contact center capabilities.  A separate but equally significant component has been the inking of partnerships with vendors ALE, Atos, Avaya, and Mitel and service providers such as AT&T, Telus, and Verizon.  The recent introduction of RingCentral Rise represents a new branch of RingCentral’s go-to-market strategy and signals a renewed commitment to the company’s network of service provider partners.

WebexOne 2021: Cisco Paints a Portrait of the Hybrid Workplace

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• WebexOne 2021 provided a window into how Cisco sees the hybrid workplace evolving.
• Cisco has been aggressive in improving the Webex platform yet still faces intense competition.

Introduction

Like its competition, Cisco has made supporting hybrid work the focal point of its cloud-based collaboration initiatives.  But Cisco stands out as being especially aggressive in assembling hybrid work capabilities.  In the past 12 months, the flagship Webex platform has seen more than 1,000 improvements.  The latest round was dissected at the recent WebexOne 2021 event.  The occasion served as not only a showcase of the latest and greatest from Cisco, but also a window into how the company sees the market evolving.  Some of the key highlights are described below.

8×8 Sets Its Sights on the “VIP” List of Cloud Collaboration Providers

Summary Bullets:

G. Willsky

• Customer Experience as-a-Service (XCaaS) represents the integration of UCaaS/CaaS.

• The chief mission behind XCaaS is raising engagement between employees from all parts of an organization and its customers to optimize the customer experience.

Appearances can be deceiving. In the cloud collaboration market, 8×8 lacks the name recognition afforded rivals such as Facebook, NICE inContact, Google, Slack, or Zoom. But the company stands out as one of the first to offer UCaaS (focused on employee communication and collaboration) integrated with CCaaS (focused on contact center agent interaction). XCaaS, or “Customer Experience as-a-Service” could lift 8×8 from the pool of “wannabes” and onto the VIP list.

Zoom Takes a Giant Leap Forward at ‘Zoomtopia’

Summary Bullets:

G. Willsky

• Zoom has matured beyond its video-centric roots into a holistic UC&C player.

• Enhancements revealed at the annual ‘Zoomtopia’ event demonstrate just how far Zoom has come – and portend how far it may go.

In a short span of time, Zoom has jettisoned its video-centric roots and blossomed into a holistic UC&C player. But Zoom has not been content with resting on its laurels. Enhancements just announced at its annual ‘Zoomtopia’ conference represent a big leap forward. Zoom has arrived and then some.