Enterprise Communicationsquipz

May 2018 Quipz

by Dave Michels

I just published my monthly Quipz report recapping May 2018. 

A reasonably big month of news. It started with Trollope’s surprise departure from Cisco and arrival at Five9. Honestly, I didn’t get it at first, but it’s grown on me since. I’ve had several conversations with Rowan and he seems pretty energized about the disruptive opportunity ahead. He’s absolutely right that the contact center segment is in for a coaster ride. You can get a glimpse of that from the Gartner CCI MQ published this month. The CCI report is premises-focused, yet still cloud played a major part. The transition from prem to cloud is a minor story, the bigger themes are how cloud-delivered CC is separating from its premises-based roots.

The CCaaS is seeing huge shifts as it bumps up against CPaaS, WEM, CRM, video, and other spaces. CC has always been somewhat contained by its PBX or UC mother. Now, as an OTT service, the sector is exploding with new ideas – and so are other customer engagement sectors. Back in the days when I ran an IT help desk (HEAT),  Like most in IT, I never really associated it with customer engagement – but Zendesk and ServiceNow see things differently. This impending collision of sectors (esp w/ CRM) combined with innovative AI, puts customer engagement in a pressure cooker. (Note, I’ve changed the section name in Quipz  from Contact Center to Customer Engagement).

I think the item that got the most attention this month was the Google Duplex demo. My two-cents on that is everyone got it wrong. 1) Of course that tech is coming (though probably not for a few years), 2) of course it should be human-like (the reaction to being fooled was surprising), and 3) it’s more likely that a Duplex bot will be calling another bot – not a human anyway.

I am confident Google set out to make the AI/bot as human-like as possible, so it must have been odd for them to capitulate after the demo with a plan to make it more robotic. Despite what they say, humans love to be fooled. I look around my house, for example, my fiberglass front door looks like wood, so does my plastic deck, so does my Hardie Board siding, so do my asphalt shingles. We like the look of wood – but a wooden front door that faces the sun in Colorado where the temp swings 100 degrees in a few months is asking for trouble. Steel is ugly, so we intentionally fool ourselves with fake wood.

Here’s a list of the TalkingPointz Quipz stories in the May 2018 issue. Quipz is only available by subscription. You can learn more about Quipz and even subscribe to it here.

UC-Centric News

  • Trollope Gallops
  • Vee for Workplace by Facebook
  • UCExpo
  • Polycom Cloud
  • CAN Teams Can Call
  • +4

Messaging-Centric News

  • TEAM BUILDing
  • Slack Actions
  • Cisco Sparked
  • Message in a Bottle Rocket
  • +2

Video-Centric News

  • Surface Hub 2
  • Konftel Expands into Video
  • Lifesize Shares
  • +3

Customer Engagement

  • MQ CCI 2018
  • Genesys CX18
  • Five9+1
  • Spring Releases
  • +4

Provider-Centric News

  • Visible Wireless
  • SD-WAN AND (not OR) MPLS
  • +3

Developer Conferences

  • F8
  • Microsoft Build
  • Google IO
  • Slack Spec

Emerging Technologies

  • MS Unifies Speech APIs
  • Alexa Reschedule My Meeting
  • +1

Miscellaneous

  • Meeker
  • Meeting of the Future
  • +2

Acquisitions

  • Dialpad Acquires TalkIQ
  • 8×8 Acquires MarianaIQ
  • +4

Financial Quipz

  • Twilio Hits 100
  • Fuze is Burning (Cash)
  • +2

This Month’s Goodreads

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