The Most Important Enterprise Communications News from November 2021

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General Industry News

This was a tough monthly boundary - there was a ton of news that dropped on the first. I typically try to keep monthly events in the appropriate monthly report, but this one got a little blurry with Re:Invent spanning both months and 8x8s acquisition of Fuze. 

I will open this report with some thoughts on hybrid work. I’m not a fan of the UCC industry’s obsession with the term hybrid. I will tell you why later. (that’s hilarious, keep reading).

First, let’s celebrate it. Hybrid work is an important development. It’s not a new concept, but tremendous innovation has made hybrid work much more effective this past year. Although I’m only sorta a digital nomad, I certainly appreciate the ability to work anywhere. I’ve been writing about this since enterprise comms discovered VoIP. I recall pioneering pieces about Microsoft LCS and Mitel’s Teleworker phones back in the days when “work is not a place” was innovative.

The pandemic caused remote and distributed work to become mainstream. People who were previously opposed to WFH or any type of distributed work were forced to embrace it, and the toothpaste isn’t going back into the office. Attitude and behaviors are permanently changed, and that’s generally good. Organizations are updating their policies, designing their offices, and purchasing their technology with hybrid work in mind. 

The UCC industry made the pandemic better. Careers, relationships, businesses, even entire sectors survived (even thrived) because of modern UCC technologies. The industry has every right to beat its chest over this triumph. 

So what’s my beef? Hybrid is only half the story. Not only is work not a place, it’s not a time. The industry is not giving this second point its proper place [sic].

For example, this month, I attended a one-hour, prime-time analyst briefing. By prime time, I’m referring to the coveted 8 AM PT slot that can accommodate a live audience across NA and Europe. I was triple booked for this particular meeting. The presenters spoke for exactly one hour. There was no Q&A or interaction whatsoever, and adding insult to injury, hybrid work was one of the themes. 

While it was a good use of my time, it was not a good use of that specific time. I would have preferred to consume that meeting later. I’m referring to async meetings. In many ways, async meetings are preferable to real-time meetings. I also have a strong preference for async events, which are much simpler to implement than hybrid events. 

Async is at the user’s control. With a meeting recording, the participant controls play and pause, and in some cases even the playback speed. When the various parameters allow it, one-hour meetings can be consumed in about 40 minutes. The main disadvantage is the inability to interact with presenters — which wasn’t even an option in the example above. 

Async meetings are a critical piece of the distributed team formula. We know async is a big benefit associated with team chat. With async, working with colleagues across multiple time zones can mean a longer but critically more flexible day and it’s a good trade. The traditional eight-hour day is obsolete. There wasn’t a choice, pre-pandemic: Attend the meeting or miss it. Now, for the first time in modern history, it’s just as easy to attend later. Interactive discussions sessions can be booked separately. It’s a big part of the way work is changing.

IMO, the industry is so focused on hybrid work that it’s missing this async component. I’m no scientist, but Albert Einstein may have been onto this. He theorized that space and time, rather than separate and unrelated phenomena, are actually interwoven into a single space-time continuum. Eureka! He was describing work post-pandemic. 

Meetings and Messaging

Teams Updates: Microsoft announced or released a series of new features associated with its Ignite conference. Ignite is its big event aimed at enterprise. Here are some of the more interesting announcements: 

It appears Facebook’s move to Meta jumped ahead of Microsoft’s news on Mesh — its new metaverse platform (not to be confused with Windows Live Mesh). Microsoft is building Mesh right into Teams, or Mesh for Microsoft Teams brings cartoon-like avatars to meetings. It is hard to predict how important the metaverse will be, but it won’t matter much in the next five years. 

Users can customize their avatars and use AI to imitate movements and gestures. The meeting spaces, too, can be reimagined to whatever environment works best. It’s all fun, but I don’t see any of Meta or any of this meta-stuff having any real impact on business interactions than Apple’s Animoji did. 

Microsoft Loop, though, is interesting. This is really more of an upgrade to Office than Teams, but it makes Office more workflow-capable. There are three main elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces. Loop components are live content that exists across multiple apps and is always updated. Users can create live, collaborative components that can be edited in the Teams workstream, email, or documents (starting with Teams chat). 

Content from camera is the never-gets-old trick of deskewing a camera’s feed of a whiteboard. Word Cloud is a clever visual tool to show the results of an open-text poll. There were several improvements to search, and attendance reports can now be downloaded. 

Crypto Messaging: Secretum is a new messaging app built on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Secretum’s angle is clever; it enables secure communications between wallets, not users. This means no centralized data storage, complete anonymity, and no moderation. It allows anonymous users to exchange messages, files, and assets. It seems logical that secure messaging and crypto will eventually intersect. I’ve seen a few attempts, but this one looks a little more interesting.  

Calendly Integrates to Webex: With the Calendly Webex integration, users can generate unique Webex conference details for meetings. Personally, I am a fan of ScheduleOnce, but Calendly solves some basic gaps in calendaring. It annoys me that neither Microsoft nor Google is innovating their calendars. Meeting technology has come so far, yet finding a time to meet, especially with external users, remains inherently manual. 

Slack Frontiers: The annual Frontiers event was pretty light this year, but to be fair, the past few months were a whirlwind. The acquisition by Salesforce finally closed, followed immediately by Dreamforce and then Frontiers. The big news was Workflows — essentially a low-code take on Slack integrations. It uses new (coded) building blocks that (no coder) users can construct and string together into workflows. 

While every UCaaS provider celebrates team chat, workflow apps like Slack are a horse of a different color. What I find particularly odd is that the UCaaS industry is jumping over itself to integrate with Teams. This seems something between peeing in your pants to get warm and digging your own grave. I suggest UCaaS providers figure out how to also embrace and validate Slack. 

Slack also announced that Slack Connect will support up to 250 organizations in one channel. It’s also improving integrations with third-party apps, including notifications and SSO.

Google Meet Updates: 2021 has been a big year for Google Meet. Meetings can now be as large as 500 users. Also, this month Google released new immersive backgrounds for Meet on the web with subtle animation. Google also now allows named Spaces in Chat (including all contents within them) to be deleted. 

News from Workplace by Facebook: First, I must say merci et au revoir to Julien Codorniou, who made huge contributions to both Workplace and my coverage of it. In other news, Workplace now integrates with Microsoft Teams (surprise). Now, employees have two, similar ways to communicate from two of the largest tech companies in the world. Or employees can access Workplace content from within Teams. Soon, users will be able to stream Teams Meetings into Workplace Groups. Workplace also added some automation tools for managing users and content. 

Engagement

Amazon re:Invent: AWS re:Invent spaned Nov and Dec, but I will cover them all here. Well, not all — AWS is huge, and re:Invent had a ton of news. I will focus on three areas: Customer Engagement, Communications, and End User Computing (EUC). I often write about these topics, but I didn’t appreciate how interconnected they were at AWS. 

For example, EUC offers thin client solutions as a service. One of the sessions featured a contact center BPO supporting thousands of agents on virtualized desktops in 40 countries. While I’ve covered the Chime SDK many times, I never quite equated it to a CPaaS. It is. Amazon Connect is what Gartner describes as a DevOps toolkit. The Connect team showcased several nontechnical users doing extraordinary things. 

Amazon talks about comms differently, but it is not that different. Amazon is addressing many of the same issues as the rest of the comms industry. But its size and resources allow it to work very quickly. Amazon talks about (speedboats and) data lakes, not (tractors and) data silos. 

re:Invent coverage is incompatible with this report’s siloed structure, but here are some selected announcements: 

Starting with Connect, announcements were mostly AI-related. There’s a new ML-powered call summarization capability associated with Contact Lens (now FedRAMP-certified). A new automated chatbot designer is associated with Lex. A few CTI updates using Wisdom and ML. We also heard about a new unified agent application and several updates to Customer Profiles, including a tool that finds/consolidates/corrects duplications. 

More importantly, we got to hear from some real-life Connect customers, including Delta Airlines, Priceline, and Traeger. And Amazon presented a clear vision statement for Connect: “To be the most powerful, flexible, and easy to use cloud contact center service, enabling companies of any scale to deliver superior customer service at lower cost.” 

The Chime SDK (read CPaaS) got an echo-cancellation upgrade and supports real-time audio, video, and screen share services. Its live transcription feature supports subtitles. Also, Chime added new endpoints (Amazon for POPs) in Oregon, Frankfurt, and Singapore. 

I’m a fan of thin client computing, and it’s become more relevant with at-home employees and BYOD. AWS has two solution families: WorkSpaces (VDI) and AppStream. AWS announced WorkSpaces Web, a managed WorkSpace that locks down access to specific websites and applications. AppStream offers apps without the desktop. It appears to be an interesting option for serving web-based CCaaS to at-home agents. AppStream 2.0 was announced with support for Linux apps and serverless fleets.

Edify in any Language: Edify Labs now offers live text translation and transcription capabilities in 108 languages powered by its built-in ML engine. The service works across multiple channels, including voice, SMS, and webchat. Agents automatically receive the message in their preferred language, and the agent’s response will automatically be received by the customer in their preferred language. The technology is made accessible via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and is billed on a usage-based model. 

I think this is really significant. It’s become surprisingly easy to get by in a country where you don’t know the language. Browser pages automatically translate, and in person, I use and hold up my phone running Google Translate. Uber eliminates having to say destination street names to the driver. 

However, I do have problems with phone calls. On a recent trip, I had to call two contact centers, and the advanced translation capabilities on my smartphone and laptop were useless. I couldn’t navigate the IVR, and I had to hope the agent spoke English. This should not be so hard in 2021. On a voice channel, the magic has to be performed in the cloud and/or agent desktop, which is what Edify is doing. 

Genesys: Genesys made two perfectly reasonable announcements with terrible timing this month. The first was G2 or Genesys and Google. The Genesys Multicloud division, which thrives in Kubernetes (developed by Google), cozied up more with Google. The new partnership includes joint selling and co-innovation. Genesys also re-announced support for Google CCAI and Chrome for CC. The bad timing was that the day after the announcement, Google Cloud had a rare outage that impacted many sites, including Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat. 

Then Genesys announced it has strengthened its relationship with Afiniti, now with a native integration. Genesys and Afiniti have a love-hate relationship as they both offer competing products. Genesys has insisted in the past that its own version of caller-agent matching is just as good — but customer choice is good. A perfectly reasonable announcement but very bad timing. Soon after came very public accusations of abusive, inappropriate activities at Afiniti. The board removed the founder as CEO of Afiniti. 

As Lloyd Bridges might say, the CMO at Genesys picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. 

Microsoft CCaaS: Finally, Microsoft announced it’s getting into CCaaS — without mentioning the term CCaaS. At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced “voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.” In other words, Dynamics now supports agents. 

Microsoft getting into CCaaS is not a surprise. I wasn’t sure if it would start with Teams or Dynamics, and now we know. Dynamics is the better place to start — emphasis on start. Like Teams, it leverages ACS. The initial release is voice-only, but Microsoft says “video is not far behind.” It can also leverage the Power Virtual Agents as voice bots. 

Nice Chat: NICE is integrating CXone with Google’s CCAI. NICE CXone provides no-code/low-code integration and consolidated journey orchestration with Google Cloud CCAI. The CXone Virtual Agent Hub allows businesses to integrate Google’s Dialogflow bots without coding. Companies can use Google Agent Assist with automated, contextual suggestions. I do like NICE’s approach of partnering. Initially, many providers thought they could build out their own AI expertise, but partnership makes more sense. Partnering with several AI providers (as NICE is doing) makes even more sense. 

Talkback: Talkdesk announced Talkdesk Feedback and Talkdesk Performance Management. Talkdesk Feedback provides surveys for customer feedback. Talkdesk Performance Management provides leaderboard-style data visualizations of agent and team performance. This is the continuing saga of CCaaS expanding more into adjacencies — in this case, WEM. It’s a logical evolution, but as a smaller pure-play, Talkdesk’s risk to its partnership ecosystem is higher. 

Content Guru SI: Content Guru announced a new partnership with Bechtle. The German IT system integrator has a large customer base in the EMEA region. 

Unified Communications

Mitel and RingCentral: Mitel announced it would cease developing its UCaaS service and instead partner with RingCentral. Mitel will refer its customers and prospects to RingCentral MVP. Note: This is not a co-branded solution as implemented with Avaya, Atos, and ALE. RingCentral agreed to pay Mitel $650M in this partnership. Also, Searchlight, the PE owners of Mitel, separately agreed to invest $200M in RingCentral equity. 

Mitel’s decision defies the market trend as PBX sales are declining and UCaaS sales are growing. However, that’s not to say it’s a bad deal. It provides Mitel a fast and lucrative way to monetize its base, and the PBX market today is bigger than the UCaaS market — with fewer competitors. Presumably associated with this news, the Mitel CEO title was passed from Mary McDowell to Tarun Loomba. I shared some additional thoughts on NoJitter: Why Mitel Went All in on Premises-based PBX. 

The change was unexpected as Mitel was set to launch its next generation of UCaaS (and CCaaS) known as Mitel One. However, two things I know about enterprise comms: Techs don’t die, and pendulums swing. I write this now on a Chromebook (dumb terminal) that’s inches from a hotel analog phone connected to a PBX. 

Intermedia Bridges Prem and Cloud: While most of the major PBX makers partnered with RingCentral, NEC took a different path to UCaaS. NEC partnered with Intermedia (I covered this at the time in this premium report). I had some initial concerns, such as a global company partnering with a regional provider. Yet both companies are doing well under the arrangement, and the partner community embraces the flexible GTM options. Now, NEC has extended the partnership to a 10-year agreement. 

The initial solution was a replacement/migration to the cloud. This is now being complemented with a NEC UNIVERGE BRIDGE. Bridge supplements existing on-prem NEC phone systems with cloud-delivered services such as conferencing, chat, file-sharing, and more. Bridge will be particularly attractive in PBX-dominant regions such as Japan. It does not require new hardware or software updates. 

Intermedia is rapidly expanding globally. See Financial section below for additional information.  

Teams Updates: Microsoft announced two calling features at Ignite; both seem a little late. Admins can now route calls to unassigned numbers, and branch-office survivability for calling is now GA. Also, the AudioCodes C455HD IP phone is the latest Teams-certified IP phone.

ALE Calling Purple: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise announced the launch of Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise Purple. It’s nice to see a new PBX platform. Purple is designed for hybrid work, specifically for enhanced services from ALE Rainbow. Purple supports UC and CC, and it can support multiple modalities, including email and social. ALE also got creative with three new lines of LINUX-powered endpoints. The app-capable phones have a very contemporary look and come in multiple colors — though oddly not purple (?). Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise intends to bring its five key verticals to the age of omni-digital communications, where everything (devices, things, colleagues, modalities, customers, students, and apps) can connect. Purple, Rainbow, endpoints, and applications are components of this strategy. 

Ooma wADA: When VoIP was new, a common way to connect was via an ADA or analog device adapter. It converted VoIP signaling into an analog signal. IP phones are the norm now, but ADAs are still used for several reasons because analog will never die. (It better not — I’ve got some really cool analog phones.) 

Ooma, which has introduced several new wireless-IP devices already, introduced this month its new AirDial device. It’s effectively an ADA, but for 5G. While there may not be demand to connect analog devices to 5G today, that might change as copper connections begin to disappear. Because Ooma AirDial will maintain a managed voice channel that doesn’t touch the public internet, the solution is expected to meet regulatory requirements such as NFPA 72 and UL 864 for life-safety systems. I guess you can call this state-of-the-art POTS. I would recommend it as a stocking stuffer this year, but Ooma intends for it to be a channel-first GTM. 

Facebook Delays E2EE: In 2019, Facebook promised to add E2E encryption to all of its messaging apps. That should have been easy because 1) Facebook can do anything it wants to, and 2) it already has it in one of its three messaging apps. But change is hard, and there are a lot of stakeholders (mostly governments and law enforcement) that think this is a really bad idea.  

End-to-end encryption is the one topic where everyone in tech actually does agree with Facebook — you can have a secure system or a system that anyone can read, but you can’t have a secure system that only the police can access. You have to choose. (We all know that the only way to stop a bad guy is to monitor his conversations.) Either way, it’s a complex, nuanced topic, and Facebook loves to publicly debate privacy, OR its new messaging architecture isn’t ready. Regardless, Facebook has postponed E2EE for at least another year. 

IMO, enterprise comms should be more secure than consumer apps. Every UCaaS provider should offer E2EE on voice, video, and messaging. Ideally, it should be on by default. If you would like to discuss further, you can reach me on Signal. 

New Direct Routing: I am ready to stop covering Direct Routing announcements. I’ve already stopped on SBCs (they all support it). It’s not that it’s not important or lucrative, but it’s not news when everyone offers it. Or maybe I will just keep a simple paragraph that can be easily modified. Something like: 

This month, [Provider(s)] have made Teams more reliable and affordable. Examples of the revolutionary features that Teams users can now access include voicemail, fax, SMS, and a variety of other features that have been available on other platforms for decades. 

This month, [PROVIDER(S)] = C3, UniVOIP, DIDWW, and RingCentral (again). 

Intermedia Unites UC and CC SaaS: Intermedia announced a new release of Unite that adds CCaaS to its UCaaS feature set. That’s voice, meetings, and messaging, call routing for UC, CCaaS, and file storage in one service with one administrative UI. The solution is aimed at small and medium businesses that can use contact center features to avoid busy signals and multi-channel interactions. The new CCaaS feature set comes from its 2019 acquisition of Telex. Intermedia Contact Center remains available. Unite is available directly from Intermedia and several others that rebrand it, including NEC. 

Beulr vMeetings: After walking away from Shark Tank empty-handed, the video hooky provider still raised $700K at a valuation of $12M. Beulr creates the impression that a user is attending an online meeting. The user just needs to upload a short video clip of supposed interest, and Beulr loops the video in the gallery. Beulr claims that 126K users have avoided +970K meetings.

So many issues here. What appears to be something between cute and harmless, Beulr actually represents a significant security risk. Users provide the service their meeting details, including login credentials. Even worse, Beulr intends to add a transcription service. IT departments initially, and soon meetings providers, will need to take action to block this type of service.

Otter.ai has a similar concept with a key difference. Otter joins as [User’s] Virtual Assistant. It’s there as an assistant, not as a ruse. The Otter assistant transcribes and records the meeting; however, it does so outside the meeting provider’s API. As a result, the recording indicator does not show. Otter does signal that it’s recording via chat message.   

Financial News

Weave Wove: Weave Communications saw its target price of $25-$28 drop to an IPO price of $24 and then close its first day at $18.79. It’s been hovering in the low twenties since. Its communication platform includes the ability for SMBs to ask for customer reviews, schedule appointments, and send marketing emails, among other things. Weave recorded $53.7M in revenue during the first six months of 2021, up from $34.7M in the same period of 2020. The company has over 130K monthly active users. 

The Financial Times reported this month that half of the companies that raised more than $1bn at IPO this year are trading below their listing price, despite robust stock markets around the world.

Intermedia (and NEC) IPO: Intermedia had planned to do an IPO last spring but pushed it, probably to Spring 22, due to market conditions (see above). The old plan was to raise $300M by offering 12.2M shares at a price range of $23-$26. The new plan is undetermined. Intermedia intends to use raised funds to accelerate its global expansion. 

A big part of its planned expansion is related to the partnership with NEC. Intermedia powers NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE UCaaS and CCaaS, and now the new UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT BRIDGE hybrid service. NEC agreed to purchase $40M of Intermedia common stock at the IPO. This allows NEC to benefit from this partnership via revenue share and the potential increase in its valuation. It’s conceptually similar to Searchlight investing in RingCentral after striking the Mitel-RingCentral partnership — and it’s the opposite of RingCentral investing in Avaya after they announced their partnership in 2019. Intermedia reported revenue of $251.6M in 2020 and $133.8M in 1H21. 

Kore.ai: Conversational AI startup Kore.ai extended its Series C funding round to $73.5M. It originally raised $50M, but Nvidia insisted Kore take more of its cash. Kore.ai helps companies build low-code AI assistants for contact centers. The technology has other use cases as well, including search. Nvidia’s interest is a significant validation. Nvidia knows a few things about speech AI and NLP. Kore.ai said it plans to integrate its SaaS platform with Nvidia’s Riva, a GPU-accelerated development kit for building speech AI applications.

Acquisitions

8x8 and Fuze: 8x8 announced its intent to acquire Fuze for $130M in cash and $120M in common stock. Technically, this should be in the December Insider Report (and it will be), but it’s too big to wait a full month. Besides, Amazon re:Invent also crossed over the monthly boundary. 

I do have a few thoughts on this. First, I am sorry to see another platform go. I started meeting with Fuze back when they were Thinking Phones. As I recall, it was one of the first pure-plays to be highly rated in the MQ. 8x8 will stick with its XCaaS platform, and the Fuze platform will fade away. 

The two companies seem surprisingly compatible and complementary. The combined company is expected to have $700M in ARR, and Fuze brings to 8x8 some great talent, larger accounts, and France. It’s also a big win for CEO Sipes. He promised 20% growth, and this delivers it. 

Consolidation seems odd in a booming market, but the boom isn’t distributed equally. It has to be a relief for Fuze. The “Fuze is in acquisition talks” rumor has persisted for years. Still, it is not the deal I wanted. I thought Avaya + Fuze right after Avaya came out of Chapter 11 was great, but what can you do? There have been others, too, over the years. However, in 2021, 8x8 and Fuze are a surprisingly nice fit. 

Market conditions are changing. There have always been big and small vendors, but now the disparity is widening. The really big vendors do well, and the really small vendors can differentiate. The middle is the danger zone. More to come in the December report.  

Ericsson and Vonage: Ericsson entered into an agreement to acquire Vonage. The acquisition, expected to close 1H22, was for $21/share or about $6.2B USD. Vonage being acquired is not as much news as Ericsson acquiring an enterprise comms provider. The story Ericsson presented is vaguely about CPaaS and 5G. Ericsson intends to leverage Vonage’s expertise with APIs and its network of +million developers to strengthen its 5G offerings. There wasn’t much said about Vonage’s core UCaaS and CCaaS offers, though they are likely a part of the strategy as a CPaaS pure-play could have been acquired for less. For more detailed analysis, see this TalkingPointz Research Note.  

Pexip and Skedify: Pexip announced the cash acquisition of Skedify with the intent to expand video use in customer engagement. Skedify offers next-generation scheduling technology for hybrid customer engagements and also offers lead qualification and video engagement. The pandemic just may force the contact center to embrace video. It’s a surprisingly complementary fit to Pexip’s portfolio. 

OpenText and Zix: OpenText entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zix Corporation for its SaaS email encryption capabilities. OpenText intends to integrate Carbonite, Webroot, and Zix to create data protection, threat management, email security, and compliance solutions for small and medium businesses. 

ITL and Magna5: International Telecom LLC (“ITL”) closes its previously announced acquisition of Magna5 Telecom from Magna5 Global. ITL revenue is approaching $100M with about 8B calls annually. 

AudioCodes and Caliverso: AudioCodes expands into AI and contact center portfolio with this cash-plus-earnout acquisition. It’s fascinating to watch AudioCodes expand from its hardware heritage to include innovative, AI-powered approaches to communications and collaboration.  

BMC and CoreDial: CoreDial was acquired by BMC One, creating one of the largest private label UCaaS providers. BCM One has +17K customers and CoreDial has about +32K customers. BMC One is essentially a PE-backed holding company that has made seven acquisitions. 

Let’s summarize: BMC acquired CoreDial and will likely combine it with SkySwitch, which it previously acquired. SkySwitch is powered by the Netsapiens, which was acquired by Crexendo. Despite these consolidations, there are probably more platforms and services available today to create a private-label UCaaS offer than ever before.

Verizon and TracFone: Vonage is on trac to become one of the largest prepaid service providers in the US. This month, the FCC approved Verizon’s $6B acquisition of TracFone. As part of its approval, the FCC required some protections for Lifeline services. Now, would someone please explain to me why prepaid cellular plans are cheaper than normal plans, or what Colin calls Sucker Plans?

This Month’s Goodreads 

1. The Smartphone, Circa 2031 The screens will be brighter and fold in different ways, the cameras will be so advanced that they’ll threaten to obviate even higher-end SLRs, and the digital assistants inside them will be smarter.
2. Microsoft resurrects Clippy again after brutally killing him off in Microsoft Teams Long live Clippy. It can’t be killed, so may as well embrace it. 
3. Mesh for Teams is Microsoft’s metaverse for meetings A week after Facebook articulated its future in the metaverse, Microsoft offered its vision for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) meetings in Microsoft Mesh for Teams
4. The Future of AI is a Conversation with a Computer AI chatbots designed for companionship have become increasingly popular, with some, like Microsoft’s Chinese Xiaoice, attracting tens of millions of users.  
5. We’re in the Middle of the ‘Great Reshuffle,’ Not the ‘Great Resignation’ This is about workers rebelling against crappy jobs.
6. Let’s chat about RCS A podcast on the messy past and uncertain future of the texting standard. 
7. Biden’s FCC is still deadlocked, and net neutrality hangs in the balance Democrats will have little chance of bringing back Obama-era net neutrality rules since the Republican commissioners remain deeply opposed to net neutrality. 
8. Innovating to net zero: An executive’s guide to climate technology New technologies, such as better batteries for electric vehicles, meat alternatives, or improved energy storage: While significant progress still needs to be made, the drive to develop and scale climate tech is accelerating. 
9. Remote Work Is Failing Gen Z Employees While we believe that the spontaneous water-cooler interactions of the office are often romanticized, we also recognize the ways in which gossip, after-work drinks and even body language come together to teach new employees the standards of behavior in the office.
10. ‘Redefine, rethink, reimagine’: The five work models emerging from the pandemic Research shows hybrid work models which mix remote and in-office locations will be the most common, although they vary in the amount of flexibility offered.

Other Stuff

The TalkingHeadz Podcasts are interviews with the movers and shakers of enterprise communications — plus we have some interesting guests. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We strive for two episodes a month. 

• Alex Doyle of Verizon: Alex(a) Explain Advanced Communications 
• Philipp Heltewig of Cognigy: Conversing about Conversational AI with Philipp of Cognigy 

 

Real-Time, Recorded is a near-weekly short video about industry news now on NoJitter. Sometimes news can’t wait for the newsletter. Dave Michels and Zeus Kerravala provide what you need to know in a short video discussion. 

 

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