This week, RingCentral reported strong results across almost all meaningful metrics for its second quarter fiscal year 2022 (FY2022), ending June 30, 2022. This is in the face of many investors maintaining a bear thesis that the return to the office and hybrid work would slow down the momentum of all the work-from-home stock. It’s arguable that no company’s stock benefitted more from the pandemic than RingCentral, holding a peak stock price of almost $380 per share. It’s also arguable that RingCentral has also been punished more by this thesis as, despite putting up continually strong numbers, the stock has fallen to about $53 per share at the time of writing.

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RingCentral’s Q2 2022 Results: Hybrid Work Fueling Cloud Comms Growth

Last week, communications vendor Avaya announced Alan Masarek would take over the role of president and CEO from Jim Chirico, who held that title for the past half-decade. Masarek is the person that took Vonage from being a consumer-focused VoIP company that ran silly commercials with sillier jingles to a company that served the needs of businesses. He did this through a multi-step process that I had outlined in this post, and when the transformation was done, he turned the captain’s chair over to Rory Read.

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6 Top Priorities for New Avaya CEO Alan Masarek

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.

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Cisco Looks to Embedded Apps to Drive Its Platform Advantage

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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.

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8×8 Rolls Out New Tools to Address the Next Wave of CCaaS Growth

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.

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Cisco Study Finds Hybrid Clouds Are Now the Norm