Enterprise Communicationsquipz

September 2018 – Whadda Month!

by Dave Michels

Just sent to subscribers my monthly recap for September. Yikes. It was a tough month.

It was tough for two reasons:

Travel: Lots of travel in September. I attended three major tech conferences: Slack Frontiers, CenturyLink Analyst Event, and Microsoft Ignite. I also snuck in a trip across the pond to see my friends at Unify. Have you ever noticed that the only time the word “pond” is used is to describe the Atlantic ocean?

Yech: There were several bad things that happened in September. In enterprise comms, the Webex outage is very disconcerting. Not only the duration, but the deafening silence from Cisco.

Not related to enterprise comms (and not in Quipz) is the whole Kavanaugh confirmation thing. I generally avoid politics on TalkingPointz, but this one has everyone frustrated.

Also, Facebook had a really, really bad month. Still reeling from the 2016 election abuses exacerbated by the Cambridge Analytica problems, in September more details emerged about its divorce with the WhatsApp founders. Then, the Instagram Founders unexpectedly split. But that was nothing compared to the massive breach. Facebook thinks some 50M accounts were affected + another potential 40M + third-party sites that affected users logged into with their Facebook credentials. This is going to spiral into something much more than a #DeleteFacebook campaign. It will lead to lots of lawsuits from users, victimized third-party websites and big inquiries from the Feds and our GDPR friends across the pond.

This is the first time (that we know of) where Facebook user accounts were compromised by outside hackers. Mark Zuckerberg personally communicated the problem and appears to be involved in the corrections.

It isn’t all bad. I’m highly intrigued (though a bit confused) by Inrupt and Solid. This is a new initiative by Tim Berners-Lee (the founder of WWW). He wants to turn the Internet upside-down and shift data control and ownership back to its rightful owners. You can read more about it in this manifesto and in this Wired article. The problem is so much of the information FANG companies is information they derive.

 

So what was covered in the Sept Quipz?

  • UC-Centric News: RingCentral Continues with BT and AT&T,
    Consumer Skype Reverts to Simplicity.
  • Workstream-Centric News: Microsoft Ignite 2018: Teams, Webex Outage, #SlackFrontiers 2018 – San Francisco, Slack IPO?, +4 more
  • Conferencing-Centric News: Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions, Cisco Fall Updates, Corporate LiveStream Hangouts, Surface Hub 2 (#MSIgnite), +3 more
  • Customer Engagement News:  Nice inContact and Salesforce Live, Salesforce and Apple
  • Provider-Centric News: #CenturyLinkAR Event, Nexmo MuleSoft, FCC vs. California, +3 more
  • Emerging Technologies: Forbes Cloud 100,  Sent from iPhone, +3 more
  • Miscellaneous: Wearable Growth, Google InBox is Out, New iPhones, 911 We Know Where You Are, Alexa Call Mom, +4 more
  • 7 Acquisitions
  • 2 Financial Quipz
  • 15  Goodreads

All this in an easy skim format.  Subscribe to Quipz here.