TalkingHeadz with Tony Bates
Key Points From This Episode Staying busy and finding fun activities during the pandemic and quarantine. Looking back on Tony’s time at Skype and the sale they made to Microsoft. The Skype family and the culture of creativity and innovation…
Genesys Xperience’19 #Xpr19
This week I attended the Genesys user conference: Xperience’19. Very interesting event, and here’s my on-site video recap: Announcements made at Xperience’19 include: Customer Innovations Awards Genesys AI Unlocks Better, Faster, Hyper-Personalized Customer Engagement Entel Improves Efficiency with Genesys AI…
The #CCTR Revolution is Upon Us
Four major Contact Center developments in three weeks. Cisco After the Cisco Collaboration Summit, Cisco hosted a separate add-on day focused on contact center (what they now call Customer Journey Solutions). It was a good time to catch up with…
Consolidation Round-up
The business communications industry is evolving fast in terms of technology, but also in the number of vendors and providers competing in this market. There were several major shake-ups that impacted the unified communications (UC) space in 2017. Mitel purchased…
Genesys Aligns Portfolios
Back in August of 2016, Genesys announced its intent to acquire competitor Interactive Intelligence, combining two market leaders in contact center and customer experience solutions. The Interactive Intelligence portfolio brings along products and services in the mid-market business segment (250-750…
Genesys Snags Interactive Intelligence
I have mixed feelings on this acquisition. I generally like it when a founder sells a company, but I didn’t have the impression Don Brown wanted to sell. I’m sure he did quite well and even if he’s not happy about…
A Fork in Avaya’s Road
There is quite a bit of speculation about Avaya’s near term future. As you may recall Avaya announced plans to evaluate options regarding its capital structure. I wrote about this here. Based on gossip and chatter, it seems that something…
Engaging Conversations -ININ 2Pager
Each year Interactive hosts its annual conference called Interactions. It’s a unique event, and the only time I ever make it to Indiana. I’m looking forward to going next year to see the new statue of Denver Bronco’s quarterback Peyton Manning….
PureCloud FY2015
I’ve said before that Interactive PureCloud is the sleeper among these new workstream communications and collaboration (WCC) services. That’s because of Interactive’s willingness to think outside its box. Interactive is one of the very few UC vendors that still has its founder,…
Cloud Contact Center: Watching the Shift
Acceptance and adoption of hosted/cloud solutions for business telephony and unified communications is well underway. This includes a shift toward cloud contact center services as businesses recognize the benefits in subscribing to a contact center solution “as-a-service” rather than purchasing…
Blabbing with Zeus
Zeus and I lost our virginity together – we did our first Blab. Blab is where video conferencing and social media intersect. We talked about Workstream Communications and Collaboration and jointly addressed several questions and topics including: How is WCC different…
Why the Slack Bubble Will Burst
Slack is a fascinating phenomenon. The company was only launched 16 months ago. Last April, it reported 750k “active users.” It is a freemium business application with an unusually high conversion rate (+25% of its users pay for services). Slack…
A Few Things in Common Between ININ and Cisco
Last week there were two worthwhile simultaneous events: Interactions 2015 and CLUS. Interactions 2015 was hosted by Interactive Intelligence in Indianapolis, IN. CLUS, or Cisco Live, was hosted by Cisco in San Diego, CA. It was impossible to attend both….
#GIACSF12
Last week, Genesys, now a part of Permira, hosted its Industry Analyst Conference in San Francisco, CA. This was the first real outreach since the division became independent of Alcatel-Lucent. For more on the separation, see prior posts: ALU’s Silient…
Cisco and Avaya Leaders Again
Cisco and Avaya were once again identified as industry leaders. This time, by a new IDC worldwide unified communications Marketscape report. The report claims to use a “rigorous scoring methodology that produces a definititive assessment of each vendro’s current market…