In a surprise move, global communications provider NEC Corp. has decided to exit the cloud communications sector in most regions of the globe. Earlier this year, NEC announced it would exit the on-premises PBX business everywhere except Japan. It would shift its focus by reselling Intermedia’s Cloud Communication solution under the brand name of UNIVERGE BLUE.
The communications artificial intelligence wars continue unabated as every unified communications-as-a-service and contact center-as-a-service vendor loads its products with new capabilities to one-up the competition. Today RingCentral Inc. added several new capabilities to RingCX, its AI-powered contact center solution. The California-based contact center solutions provider has added about 300 features to RingCX in the past quarter, bringing the total to more than 1,300.
I’ve talked to enough companies now to know that hybrid will be the most common work model moving forward. My research shows that 75% of users will continue to work from home at least one day a week, emphasizing digital tools, such as unified communications and collaboration (UCaaS) tools.
This week 8×8 Inc. held a financial and industry analyst event at the Nasdaq building in Times Square, and with a venue like that, one would expect something big. The company certainly delivered, going news-heavy today by loading up its product with several new artificial intelligence capabilities targeting customer experience improvement.
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.