A lot of action in the Cloud Comm Provider space recently.
Zoom did a Microsoft Teams thing with Zoom IQ. Zoom AI Companion (formerly known as Zoom IQ), the company’s generative AI digital assistant, is now included at no additional cost for customers with the paid services in their Zoom user accounts.
Zoom has introduced a new notetaking tool called Zoom Notes to enhance collaboration before, during, and after meetings. AI. AI. AI. Puke.
Mitel is innovating in the handset with new DECT phones. Not for nothing but with some of this “news” on sites like NJ or UC2day, you can tell it is a PAID article and not news, but the site doesn’t want to acknowledge that. It taints the whole industry when literally everything is Pay-to-Play.
Since RingCentral got a new CEO things have been sliding. The new CEO started Aug. 28th yet hasn’t had a town hall meeting with the whole team as of yet. However, there was another round of Layoffs. They took out the second layer of channel personnel last week. Two people reporting to Zane Long, who is still there, are gone: the North American Channel leader and the EMEA head of Channel and Strategic leader. No one saw this coming.
The RingCX AVP was laid off three weeks ago, yet they just started offering 15X SPIFF on RingCX. I guess he was fired because he couldn’t get sales.
RNG also let MO go. He was President and COO – and now RNG lacks both. That should bode well.
Over the years RNG has been a pendulum with handsets. They wish no one wanted them but at least half the sales ask for handsets. Now RNG is doing Hardware as a Service (or Device as a Service) with phones. RingCentral offers a range of DaaS phones, with prices starting at $4 per month for the Yealink T33G desk phone and going up to $43 per month for the Poly Trio C60 conference phone.”
RNG also completed an integration with JenesisNow. “JenesisNow enhances insurance agency and client communication with RingCentral VOIP integration.” Integrations are going to be what drives sales.
8×8 Launches New SMS Fraud Prevention Communication API — 8×8 Omni Shield CPaaS Solution Enables Enterprises to Proactively Safeguard Customers Against Artificial Inflation of Traffic Attacks.
8×8 was looking for Target Market Clarity and Go-to-Market focus, so they decided to focus on small medium enterprise (SME) market (under 10,000 seats), where the company can differentiate with an integrated UCaaS +CCaaS solution. Also to target CCaaS up to 1,000 seats by leveraging its conversational AI capabilities. That means everyone. That is literally 97% of all businesses on the planet. That isn’t focus — that is thinking you sell Spaghetti. You are selling Spaghetti; you are selling UC+CC and sometimes CPaaS or, right, just dial-tone for Teams; yeah, that is 300M businesses, but why would a majority of them buy from you? 8×8 has been around since 1987 – and has 60K customers — out of 33M businesses in the US.
The SMB sector represents 61.7 million employees, which is 46.4% of private sector employees. 8×8 has 3M users – less than 5% of that sector – but chose to chase other sectors because needed to say enterprise.
Microsoft Unbundles Teams From Office 365 in Europe! There will be some room for UCaaS providers now in EU.