Business have been moving to a cloud operating model for the better part of two decades, but the term “cloud” has been continuously evolving. Early cloud deployments were akin to hosted services where a business would “lift and shift” a workload to an offsite location. For the past decade or so, cloud has been defined by public clouds, where businesses would deploy data and/or workloads in a hyper-scaler such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Earlier this month, Talkdesk launched a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer service platform, the Retail Experience Cloud. As the name implies, the platform is designed specifically for retailers and provides agents with a unified view of all customer interactions across different communication channels.
After a three-year hiatus, Cisco Live returns to an in-person format. While the show has evolved over the years to appeal to line of business and corporate executives, its core audience is still the engineer that makes their living deploying and operating Cisco equipment. While much of the innovation at the show is in networking, over the years, Webex has become a more prominent part of the show.
It’s been three years since Cisco had an in-person version of Cisco Live, the massive user event that typically draws over 20,000 attendees. I’ve been attending the show since the late 1990s, when I was an engineer and have noticed a significant change in the content in the show. When I first started attending, the event was a hardcore technical show centered around Cisco. Today, the show has become more of an industry show that drives thought leadership in the areas of networking, security and collaboration, similar to what NVIDIA GTC is to AI, VMware VMworld is to virtualization, and Salesforce Dreamforce is to customer experience.
Zoom announced its quarterly results for Q1 of the fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023), and the results confirmed that its “land and expand strategy” is working. The company’s revenue rose 12.3% year over year (YoY) to $1.07 billion. It also reported two-quarters of sequential growth for its gross margin, which management attributed to optimizing usage across the public cloud and increasing the number of co-located data centers.