The topic of conversational AI is certainly a hot one, and rightfully so. Customer experience (CX) reigns supreme when it comes to business competition today but ensuring a high-quality CX isn’t as easy as it used to be. The pandemic accelerated digital transformation plans. My research shows that 74% of companies accelerated digital initiatives by at least one year, about a third of those by two years or more.
Throughout 2021, the pandemic influenced corporate buying behavior as hybrid work models became more permanent, replacing ad-hoc strategies initially used to support remote workers. Organizations changed their buying behavior in favor of more flexible, efficient, and cost-effective IT strategies, according to Tangoe’s newly released 2021 Market Trends Report.
This week Juniper Networks announced its new Secure Edge product, which is a cloud-based firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) solution. The new product will be part of its secure-access service edge (SASE) portfolio, which currently includes application control, anti-malware, identity and access control, intrusion prevention, threat intelligence, zero trust, and secure web access. All the features available in Juniper’s on-premises SRX next-generation firewall (NGFW) are now available from the cloud.
This morning Extreme Networks announced its quarterly results for Q2 FY22. As has been the trend recently, Extreme put up another solid quarter, posting revenues of $280.9 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.21, beating the expected numbers of $272.1 million and $0.17, respectively.
Today, Bandwidth announced that its global bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) product, Duet, is now available for Genesys contact center customers. To date, Bandwidth has aimed Duet at UCaaS deployments and currently has partnerships with Microsoft Teams and RingCentral. Genesys is the first CCaaS provider to partner with Bandwidth, or any provider, in such a way.