Hewlett Packard Buys Poly To Address Hybrid Work Requirements

In a surprise move, Hewlett Packard announced a definitive agreement to acquire Poly, a vendor of workplace collaboration solutions for $3.3B in cash, which is inclusive of about $1.6B in debt.

This marks the end of an era for Poly, formerly Polycom, which was one of the pioneers of videoconferencing. The current Poly company is a combination Polycom business and Plantronics, which acquired the video vendor in 2018. Later that year, Logitech attempted to purchase Poly, but the deal fell apart at the 11th hour.

Amazon Connect Previews New Contact Center Capabilities

After two years, the Enterprise Connect show returned to an in-person format in Orlando, Florida. Enterprise Connect is typically a show that communications vendors use to announce new products and features – and Amazon Web Services (AWS) did just that.

Mitel Focuses on Cloud Partnership and Innovating at the Edge

Communications and the cloud have seemingly become synonymous. The pandemic-induced trend toward working from home prompted companies to adopt “as a service,” or UCaaS, solutions for collaboration.

This created a massive wave of deployments, and some industry observers began to believe that the on-premises opportunity, which includes private cloud, will no longer be viable.

Juniper Brings Intent-Based Networking to the Edge

Many predicted that the cloud would be the death knell for data centers. The use of public cloud services would make data centers obsolete – but that never came true.

In fact, the data center has never been more important. The enterprise is going through a data center Renaissance, where everything is moving to some kind of data center – whether it’s in a centralized public cloud, private cloud or edge location.

Contact Center Trends and Tech: Engagement is Omni-Channel

COVID-19 accelerated a buy-from-home economy, expanding the role of the contact center beyond customer support to building customer relationships. According to a new report released by Talkdesk, the majority of customer experience (CX) professionals believe their contact center is a main driver of customer loyalty.