The pandemic has permanently changed the way people work, as well as the role that communication and collaboration technology plays in our lives. Clearly, the hybrid work model is here to stay post-pandemic. One vendor at the heart of this digital transformation is Avaya, whose roadmap for hybrid work involves an open platform that focuses on organizations’ current and future communication and collaboration needs.
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.
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.
The pandemic-induced digitization of everything has been well-documented as businesses had to shut their doors and find a different way of interacting with customers via digital initiatives.
Prior to the pandemic, digital transformation was something most companies were just thinking about. Post-pandemic, it’s something most companies rely on to transact business and provide service and everything else in the customer lifecycle.
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.