Over the past few years, Cisco has been pivoting Webex from being a product to a platform. In communications, at a most basic level, platform means having a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) back end that the vendor can use to build its unified communication (UC) and/or contact center software on.
The past two years has seen contact center as a service (CCaaS) go through unprecedented growth as businesses looked to enable contact center agents to work from home. For most companies, shifting to the cloud was a faster and simpler solution than trying to extend legacy, on-prem solutions to remote locations. Cloud contact center solutions generally have better tools for managers and are now being outfitted with AI to enable agents to service customers better.
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.