Top 10 UC Events of 2018Top 10 UC Events of 2018

When I think about 2018, all I can think is WOW! There was lots of interesting stuff that happened in 2017, like Amazon jumping into the contact center space, Avaya emerging from bankruptcy, and Cisco announcing its intent to acquire BroadSoft. But 2017 seems like small potatoes compared to the goings-on in 2018. Without further ado, here is my list of the top 10 things that happened in enterprise communications in 2018.

1. Changes at Cisco -- If there’s one thing that should be expected from Cisco in the Chuck Robbins era, it’s change. But the activity in Cisco’s Collaboration business took it to an entirely new level. The biggest news was all of the executive departures, including CTO Jonathan Rosenberg, OJ Winge, Snorre Kjesbu, and the most recent announcement of VP and GM of the Collaboration Technology Group, Tom Puorro. The most surprising departure was SVP and GM of IoT and Applications, Rowan Trollope, who headed off to cloudier pastures (more on that later).

The news in the Collaboration group wasn’t all about departures, as Cisco’s acquisition of relationship intelligence company, Accompany, brought Amy Chang into the fold. Chang is now the new SVP of Collaboration, and will be sharing her vision for the business in a keynote address at Enterprise Connect 2019. Another new addition is Aruna Ravichandran, who joins Cisco as the Collaboration CMO, coming from Juniper Networks. Aruna’s skills and energy level are second to none, and she and Amy will make a formidable team. One more people-related item: Congrats to the group’s new CTO, Cullen “Fluffy” Jennings (who graduated from the same high school as me).

Other news from Cisco Collaboration included the repositioning of WebEx to Webex Meetings and Spark to Webex Teams, some changes to the HCS partner ecosystem, and lastly, the new brand campaign of “The Bridge to Possible.”

2. Five9 Lands Rowan Trollope as CEO -- There are few companies as stable as Five9, particularly at the executive level. However, when long-time CEO Mike Burkland stepped down due to health issues, the company decided to go looking for someone who could take it to the next level. After an exhaustive search, it chose the always charismatic Rowan Trollope to be its next leader.

The move surprised some, but anyone who has spent time with Trollope knows his goal was to be a CEO, and the success he had at Cisco set himself up for it. The bigger question was, why contact center? The answer can be found in this No Jitter post by Michelle Burbick. Trollope’s answer was, “Why not contact center?” citing that all the action was there now. The contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market is changing and becoming more artificial intelligence (AI)-focused, giving Trollope an opportunity to create another wave of growth for Five9. If a part of a CEO’s role is to make the shareholders happy, he’s done a great job, as the stock is up about 30% since he joined. More to come, I’m sure.

3. Plantronics Acquires Polycom -- The long, quixotic journey for Polycom came to an end in March, when Plantronics announced its intention to acquire the company for $2 billion from Siris Capital. It had been quite a journey for the video pioneer, which had an agreement to be acquired by Mitel that fell apart when Siris made a bid to take it private. Both Plantronics and Polycom have great assets, and together they can meet the needs of the modern workplace.

4. Customer Experience (CX) Is a Big Deal -- Contact centers have always been about customer experience, but in 2018 it seems like we got CX on steroids. Gartner, Walker Group, and others predicted a few years ago that CX would be the No. 1 brand differentiator in 2020. The reality is that we are already in that era and businesses need to act now -- hence all the recent focus on contact center evolution.

Creating that next-generation contact center requires an omnichannel contact center, but that should be thought of as table stakes. The system must also include a number of AI capabilities, including natural language processing, real-time translation, intelligent bots, voice and facial recognition, and a lot more. To enable this, many contact center vendors announced at the Google Cloud Next event in July that they were partnering with Google on Contact Center AI. With so many players involved, the battleground will be won by creating additional differentiation on top of Google’s capabilities.

5. Avaya Is Back as a Publicly Traded Company -- Ding! Ding! Ding! January 17 was the day Avaya returned to the public markets, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “AVYA.” It was a long hiatus for Avaya, which was taken private in 2007. Its return to public trading was the final step in the renaissance of the company, which went into and emerged from bankruptcy, restructured, and changed its management team in 2017. Since then, CEO Jim Chirico has been busy acquiring Spoken Communications, hiring a new cloud chief, changing its look, and launching a new marketplace. Given Avaya’s market share, the industry needs it to be healthy to help drive UC and CC in new directions.

6. Mitel Goes Private -- Trying to shift from a predominantly premises-based business model to a cloud-first one is akin to changing the wings on a plane while it’s flying. It can be done, but any hiccups can have disastrous consequences. This was the dilemma Mitel was facing, particularly as a publicly traded company under the watchful eye of Wall Street. In April, Searchlight Capital ponied up about $2 billion for Mitel to take it private. Mitel’s CEO Rich McBee, CFO Steven Spooner, and CMO Wes Durow make up a solid management team, and now the company has the opportunity to make the tough decisions it needs to in order to compete better in the future.

7. RingCentral Breaks Away from the Pack in UCaaS -- A year ago, RingCentral and 8x8 were neck and neck for UCaaS leadership, with Vonage being a close third. Over the past 12 months, RingCentral has blitzed the industry with marketing, been aggressive with channel, and stepped on the product gas to break away from the pack. According to Yahoo Finance, this year the company is projected to grow 33%, compared to 19% for 8x8 and 5% for Vonage. Of the challengers to RingCentral, Vonage spent much of the past few years re-tooling through a mix of acquisitions and home-grown products. Its UCaas + CCaaS + CPaaS go-to-market is differentiated, and CEO Alan Masarek has done a nice job bringing in the new without disrupting the older products. This should set up a good battle for years to come, but right now, it’s advantage RingCentral.

8. Zoom Zooms into UC -- Many of the vendors that play in the UC ecosystem are one-trick ponies. Zoom is an excellent example of this, as the company offers a competitive, easy-to-use online meeting platform. Its aggressive marketing, combined with LogMeIn’s bumbling of the GoToMeeting business, created an opportunity for the niche vendor and its business has been zooming since. This year, at its second annual Zoomtopia user conference, the company launched a number of new products, including Zoom Voice and Zoom Rooms, making it a full-fledged UCaaS vendor. Voice is very easy to do, but as so many have found out, quality voice that scales is very difficult to do, so it will be interesting to see if Zoom can convert its meetings base of customers to UC.

9. Twilio Flexes its Contact Center Muscles -- Enterprise Connect has become a platform for vendors to launch major products. Twilio chose the 2018 event to launch its contact center offering, Flex. As contact center analyst Sheila McGee-Smith points out in her No Jitter post, Twilio’s hypothesis is that the high end of the contact center market has remained dominated by on-premises solutions because the current crop of CCaaS offerings can’t scale up to tens of thousands of seats. Also, Twilio can offer a level of customization not typically found with CCaaS services. Will customers gravitate toward this type of building block approach? Lyft and Shopify have, and it will be interesting to see how many other businesses follow.

10. The UC Industry Says Goodbye to Brian Riggs -- Of all the industries I cover, none have the same kind of family feel as UC does. This year we sadly had to say goodbye to long-time analyst Brian Riggs, who passed in a tragic accident. I didn’t know Brian as well as many of you, but I did know he was liked by everyone and never heard a negative word about him. Enterprise Connect GM Eric Krapf wrote a wonderful post about him. He was just one person, but he added a lot to this little family of ours.