From APIs to UC: Rounding Up the News from EC19From APIs to UC: Rounding Up the News from EC19

Looking back on the week of Enterprise Connect 2019 can make your head spin. And if the countless attendee emails I’ve received are any indication, the general consensus seems to be that we all wish we could have been in two, three, or maybe five places at once.

While we’ve covered many of the highlights and vendor announcements coming out of the event here on No Jitter, with an event of this scale -- nearly 220 exhibitors -- plenty of other news may have flown under your radar. To help get you up to speed, here’s a roundup of news we haven’t already covered, broken out into categories as best as possible for an industry in which divisional lines are increasingly blurring.

Contact Center & Customer Engagement

The contact center space is hot, so much so that we elevated the subject matter to the EC19 mainstage. From startup launches to upgrades across the spectrum of incumbent providers, the news was plentiful.

Introducing Edify

Startup Edify Labs chose EC19 for its reveal of Edify, a cloud-based, customer experience (CX)-focused business communications solution that combines the core functionality of CPaaS, CCaaS, and UCaaS/PBX platforms with customer success tools. In a pre-briefing with co-founder Cameron Weeks, I learned that Edify is very much focused on bringing proactive customer engagement to all the corners of an enterprise’s communications by combining the core functionality of communications platform, contact center, and UC as-a-service solutions. With Edify, enterprises can take a holistic approach to its communications, as the platform combines internal collaboration, contact center, and UC functionality with customer success tools and machine learning enhancements.

“As customer service, proactive customer engagement, and back-office needs converge, Edify has created a new way for organizations to ensure customers get what they need across all channels in the sales and service cycle -- powered by a single workflow,” said Blair Pleasant, co-founder of BCStrategies and founder of COMMfusion, in a prepared statement.

The Edify platform is fully customizable and designed to scale, Weeks told me. Other features include channel-agnostic cross-department collaboration; support for real-time streaming data for voice, video, chat, and screen sharing; real-time communications APIs; contact center functionality that includes ACD, omnichannel, coaching, and training; a proprietary UC/CC application, API platform, and telecom network; and support for certifications including PCI, HIPAA, ISO: 270001, SOC 2, and GDPR.

Edify’s platform is currently available in a limited private release, and users can request access on the company’s website. It’s due for general availability this quarter; pricing models vary based on enterprise need.

Sharpen Intros AXS

Cloud contact center provider Sharpen Technologies has made its Agent Experience Score (AXS) generally available. With AXS, Sharpen said it hopes to redefine the way companies measure contact center success by incorporating a new “empowerment metric” into traditional key performance indicators.

AXS uses a proprietary algorithm to quantify and then aggregate agent empowerment, efficiency, and effectiveness, giving managers a more holistic view into performance, Sharpen said. The company has also enhanced agent experience by incorporating bots that drive in-line coaching for agents and managers.

“The problem is this: 89 percent of companies rank employee engagement as an important priority, but only one quarter of them consider their agents to be extremely engaged,” said COMMfusion’s Pleasant, in a prepared statement. “Sharpen’s AXS seeks to connect this divide by intelligently aggregating all dimensions of the agent experience to give managers the insight they need to more deeply engage agents so they can deliver better customer experiences.”

Cisco Brings Cognitive to Contact Center

While No Jitter bloggers have already covered and discussed much of Cisco’s EC19 presence, here are some additional details on its intentions for bringing cognitive collaboration to its contact center offerings. The announcement encompasses three areas.

First, it’s making its cloud analytics reporting service, called Customer Journey Analyzer, available for on-premises contact center offerings including the Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Packaged Contact Center Enterprise, and Unified Contact Center Express. This version of Analyzer is the first of many cloud-based services Cisco is making available to on-premises contact center customers, Vasili Triant, VP & GM of Cisco’s Customer Care business unit, wrote in a Cisco Blogs post. The company is doing so to help customers begin their journey to the cloud in practical, small steps, while still protecting valuable on-premises investments, Triant said.

Second, Cisco is introducing Cisco Answers, a cloud-based intelligent agent powered by Google Contact Center AI. The virtual agent listens to interactions and assists agents with contextual information so they can be more knowledgeable and reduce customer wait time.

Third, Cisco is enhancing its Customer Journey Platform with Customer Virtual Assistant, an integrated bot self-service capability for handling customer requests that don’t quite require a live agent.

NICE inContact Releases Salesforce Integrations

Cloud contact center solution provider NICE inContact announced CXone packages integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud. These new CXone Packages for Salesforce provide carrier-grade voice, intelligent routing for Salesforce digital channels, embedded workforce optimization, and speech/text analytics, the company said.

By combining the CXone intelligent routing for digital channels capabilities with customer attributes from Salesforce records, contact centers will be better able to match up agents and customers. Better matches should lead to faster resolution and fewer transfers between agents, as well as the option to provide higher levels of service to premium customers, NICE inContact said.

CXone Packages for Salesforce come in three versions:

Calabrio Releases Latest CX Suite

Calabrio, which bills itself as CX intelligence company, introduced the latest version of its Calabrio ONE suite. Calabrio ONE version 11 focuses on workforce optimization, providing users and contact center managers with access to data-driven insights – "regardless of their experience with analytics,” said Matt Matsui, chief product officer at Calabrio, in a prepared statement.

With this release, Calabrio has embedded artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics throughout the suite so that users can analyze, visualize, and take action without interrupting their workflows.

Additionally, Calabrio said it has improved and expanded its suite-wide monitoring, notification, and configuration capabilities to ease administration efforts and increase scalability. With updated auditing and alerting functionality, admins can better ensure that Calabrio ONE integrations with CPaaS partner solutions remain stable and continue to perform. Finally, new scheduling tools enable managers to manage the workforce more dynamically.

More Contact Center/CX news:

Click below to continue to next page: AI/Analytics/Speech Technologies, UC & Team Collaboration, and more

AI/Analytics/Speech Technologies

With so much overlap between contact center and AI/analytics news, this seems as good a spot as any to break into the next category. AI was everywhere at EC19, as you can see in our No Jitter coverage here, here, here, here, and here. But here are some other AI-related bits of news, too.

Avaya Deepens Google Cloud Partnership

Avaya, one of the original partners Google named last year for its Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution, announced further integration with CCAI in efforts to improve customer experiences and enable a more efficient workforce. Google and Avaya are working together in three key areas:

CallMiner Launches Eureka Visualize

CallMiner, which offers the Eureka speech and customer engagement analytics platform, announced the launch of Eureka Visualize. Visualize, powered by business intelligence platform Tableau, does just about what you’d expect a product in this vein to do: It visualizes speech analytics data in a customizable dashboard and reports.

Via Visualize, enterprises can discover opportunities where speech analytics data can offer insight and improvement. With a Compare feature, organizations can compare A/B campaigns and evaluate alternatives to drive results. Further, with an Articulate feature, businesses can use graphics that help tell their stories and distribute information and education across an organization.

For more from CallMiner, check out its latest whitepaper on how speech analytics can help contact center organizations achieve optimal efficiency and agent performance.

Masergy Launches AI-Powered Virtual Agent

Masergy, known for its software-defined WAN, cloud, and managed security solutions, announced the launch of Masergy Intelligent Virtual Agent, which powers all virtual assistant and chatbot features for its UCaaS solutions and serves as the queueing agent for Masergy Cloud Contact Center. This offering represents the company’s “ongoing commitment to [help] enterprises make the shift from reactive to proactive customer service,” said Bob Laskey, EVP and chief revenue officer, in a prepared statement. “Masergy Intelligent Virtual Agent operationalizes advancements in AI, speech recognition, and natural language processing to enhance an always-available voice for customer service.”

Masergy developed the solution in partnership with Inference Solutions. It is aimed at helping organizations drive growth in a low-cost way, by adding intelligence to repetitive tasks, applying natural language processing to improve task completion accuracy, and improving customer experience through the addition of self-service capabilities, among other ways, the company said.

UC & Team Collaboration

From new calling solutions to a cloud adoption program and integrations to boot, activity in these core areas sure speaks well for the future of UC and team collaboration.

Cisco Intros Webex Calling

Among other news, Cisco announced an enterprise-class, native-cloud solution, Webex Calling.

Webex Calling brings together Cisco’s BroadCloud platform with Webex, as Scott Hoffpauir, VP of cloud calling technology group at Cisco, wrote in a Cisco Blogs post. It combines a full enterprise PBX feature set with the team collaboration capabilities of Webex Teams.

Webex Calling is available today in the U.S. as part of Cisco’s Collaboration Flex Plan sold by Cisco VAR channel partners. Webex Calling will be available in more than 35 countries across North America, Europe, and the APAC region by the end of the year, Cisco said.

Avaya Intros Cloud Transformation Program

While we already touched on Avaya’s contact center AI efforts with Google, the company also introduced a program aimed at assisting organizations considering cloud communications delivery models as part of their digital transformations.

The program provides enterprises with professional services resources and incentives to help them map out the most effective and efficient path to implementing Avaya OneCloud solutions. Avaya customers that enroll in the program and ultimately implement an Avaya OneCloud solution will receive credits for perpetual licenses and reduced per-seat cloud pricing, as well as have termination penalties removed from current support services contracts, Avaya said.

Program participants can also take advantage of cloud transformation workshops in which Avaya professional services cloud experts will work with an organization’s decision makers to develop an understanding of what a cloud transformation would look like for the business and which Avaya OneCloud deployment model is the best fit. In these workshops, participants will develop implementation timelines and define business outcomes.

In a prepared statement, Zeus Kerravala, longtime No Jitter contributor and founder of ZK Research, summed up the value proposition as such: “For business leaders digitally transforming their communications via the cloud, it is important they find solutions that fit their workflows and a solution provider that offers a range of options.”

Ribbon Communications Ramps Up UC Partnerships

Ribbon Communications had a busy EC19 week, announcing several partnerships. To start, the enterprise software provider announced that its Session Border Controller Software edition (SBC SWe) now supports the recently launched Amazon Chime Voice Connector on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Voice Connector is AWS’s new SIP service that offers global calling with pay-as-you-go pricing. Ribbon’s SBC SWe provides Amazon Chime customers with security, high availability, and interoperability for VoIP traffic being sent to and from Amazon Chime Voice Connector, Ribbon said.

Separately, Ribbon announced the general availability of SBC SWe Lite, a virtualized enterprise SBC for small and midsized businesses, in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. SWe Lite is fully certified to deliver secure voice services for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and Skype for Business, Ribbon said. This move represents a ”major step forward” in Ribbon’s cloud investment strategy, said Kevin Riley, CTO for Ribbon, in a prepared statement.

Lastly, Ribbon announced an integrated solution with its SBC and 128 Technology’s SD-WAN technologies. The solution is aimed at solving several common cloud networking issues, including bandwidth inefficiencies, security gaps, and high operational costs, the company said.

More Notable UC/Team Collaboration News:

Click below to continue to next page: Headsets & Phones, Video Collaboration & AV, and more

Headsets & Phones

The UC/team collaboration world wouldn’t be anywhere without headsets and phones on which to conduct those voice and video conversations. Here’s a look at some of the latest news in this product category.

Sennheiser Debuts Headsets

Audio solutions provider Sennheiser launched its double-sided MB 360 UC headset, aimed at workers who need to concentrate in noisy environments like open offices or coworking spaces. It features active noise cancelling (ANC) technology, and soft earpads for wearing comfort throughout the workday, Sennheiser said.

Sennheiser has optimized the MB 360 UC, which supports up to 25 hours of talk time, for use with UC applications. However, the headset also connects to a mobile device for on-the-go use.

Separately, Sennheiser announced availability of USB headsets compatible with AWS’s contact center and team collaboration solutions, Connect and Chime. As such, Sennheiser is now part of the AWS Partner Network, the company said.

Jabra Launches Evolve 65e

Jabra launched its second-generation wireless earbuds, Evolve 65e, featuring a soft neckband. The Evolve 65e is UC-certified, including for Microsoft Skype for Business, and features a battery life that can support eight hours of talk and 13 hours of music.

The Evolve 65e earbuds come with a Jabra Link 370 USB Bluetooth adapter for simultaneous connectivity to a laptop or PC and smartphone. Wireless range is 100 feet for PCs and 33 feet for mobile devices, for roaming during calls. It also features a built-in busy light that acts as a “do not disturb” signal to co-workers when on a call.

“Enterprises are constantly seeking new ways to enable their employees to be productive wherever they are, making UC one of the most important mobile technologies today,” said Holger Reisinger, SVP of enterprise solutions at Jabra, in a prepared statement.

Yealink Announces New Phones for Microsoft Teams

Yealink, longtime Microsoft UC device partner, announced enhanced interoperability with Microsoft Teams through three new phones: the entry- and mid-level desk phone T56A, the premium desk phone T58A, and conference phone CP960 for huddle rooms and large conference rooms.

All three devices come embedded with a native Teams application that incorporates calling and meeting features. Further, these Yealink devices are designed to support future builds so that AI enhancements can be made to make communication smarter, Yealink said.

Panasonic Intros Cordless Desk Phone

Panasonic System Solutions Company of North America announced the launch of the Panasonic KX-TPA68, a SIP cordless communication terminal.

The new cordless desk phone offers a “real-time shared call appearance” that lets users pick up, retrieve, and join calls from lines shared across multiple desk phone units connected to the same base unit, Panasonic said. Users can monitor the status of up to six lines from the same touchscreen display.

The KX-TPA68 comes with a 3.5-inch color LCD, a full-duplex speaker phone, and higher voice volume than the previous model. It also features an upgraded noise reduction feature for automatically adjusting audio volume in noisy environments. It works alongside any combination of up to seven additional Panasonic cordless or desktop DECT phones per KX-TGP600 base unit.

Video Collaboration & AV

Another hotbed of activity at EC19 was the video collaboration and AV space.

BlueJeans Intros Rooms-as-a-Service Offering

BlueJeans Network revealed plans to offer a new service-based subscription model for organizations looking to adopt its cloud meetings platform with audio hardware from its partner, Dolby. This rooms-as-a-service packaging provides the BlueJeans Rooms license, Dolby Voice Room hardware, and maintenance and support in a single invoice.

Coupling devices with cloud services in “as-a-service” packages is a rising trend, as we’ve seen from companies such as Avaya, which introduced a huddle-as-service offering in early March. The goal of such offerings is to deliver predictable pricing along with an easier approvals process and the ability to add rooms as needed without pain, said John Knightly, SVP product and solution marketing, in a No Jitter briefing on the EC Expo floor.

“This is an ‘OpEx right oriented’ offering,” Knightly added. “And what’s more is that it basically gives you one throat to choke on the vendor side, and that’s Blue Jeans.”

This rooms-as-a-service concept is catching on with IT, said Ira Weinstein, managing partner at Recon Research, as well as the EC19 Video Collaboration & AV track chair. In interviews with 24 end-user technology managers, Recon learned all were either somewhat or very interested in such a model. “Even massive companies with huge deployments were intrigued by the idea of a turnkey offering of this kind,” said Weinstein, in a prepared statement.

BlueJeans hasn’t released specifics on included capabilities, availability, and pricing, but Knightly said the rooms-as-a-service package would be available “soon, for as low as $169 a month, depending on your terms and length of subscription.”

Lifesize Sizes Room Systems Down

Cloud-based video conferencing provider Lifesize has expanded its line of 4K-capable meeting room systems with two models -- the Icon 300 and the Icon 500 -- for huddle rooms and midsized meeting spaces.

Given the “critical role in organic collaboration” these smaller meeting spaces play within an organization, the company’s goal with these new models is to do away with the technology disparity between them and larger meeting spaces, said Lifesize CEO Craig Malloy, in a prepared statement.

Toward that end, while the Icon 300 is designed to serve huddle rooms and other small spaces, it also provides advanced capabilities such an ultrawide field of view, support for 4K full-motion content sharing, and noise-reducing audio. The Icon 500, for medium-sized rooms, also provides full-motion 4K content sharing, as well as 4K video quality. In addition, the 500 model supports dual displays and integrated 5x zoom for high-fidelity views of speakers and content, Lifesize said. Both models are purpose-built for use with Lifesize’s cloud-based video conferencing service.

The Icon 300 is available now, beginning at $3,000. The Icon 500 is available for pre-order, with general availability expected this summer. Pricing should fall between the Icon 300 and the Icon 700, which is tagged at about $7,500, the company said.

Bluescape Debuts New Feature, API Integrations

Bluescape announced a digital whiteboard feature to bring “back the fun and imagination around brainstorming,” the company said. This digital whiteboard is available for individual or team use on touchscreens running on Linux. Users can import their whiteboards into a Bluescape workspace for additional collaboration.

Separately, on the administration front, Bluescape announced functionality that allows clients to customize security to fit their network protocols, rules, and access controls. Via a new “custom roles” feature, organizations can set different user and access permissions at three levels: applications, organization, and Bluescape workspace.

Additionally, as part of its efforts to expand the collaboration experience for its users, Bluescape announced API enhancements for Adobe Creative Cloud. Via a plugin for Adobe Photoshop users, Bluescape enables people to work, update, and share photos and graphics in Photoshop, Bluescape, and other design applications without having to leave the application. For Adobe users, Bluescape is offering a free one-month trial program of Bluescape, available for download on the Adobe Exchange Marketplace.

Kaptivo Boosts Whiteboard Collaboration

Kaptivo, our Best of Enterprise Connect 2019 finalist for the Best Communications/Collaboration Device Category award, announced Kaptivo Business Edition, a lower price point version of its whiteboard collaboration system aimed at organizations with smaller deployments.

Kaptivo uses patented digital image processing technology to capture, render, and stream a version of a standard whiteboard viewable via the Kaptivo Web-based app, on any device, or shared live through video conferencing systems like BlueJeans, Cisco, Lifesize, Polycom, Zoom, and others, the company said.

Kaptivo Business Edition features include:

More Notable Video Collaboration/AV News:

Click below to continue to next page: CPaaS & APIs, Network Management, and more

CPaaS & APIs

From API-driven service enhancements to marketplace news, here are a handful of announcements around programmable communications.

Vonage Debuts Number Programmability

Tapping into its Nexmo API platform, Vonage has introduced a capability that adds programmability to any Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) phone number, giving users access to an array of functionality beyond the basic voice call.

For example, users might add a calendar check capability to their numbers such that when they’re not able to answer incoming calls, the caller would receive a voice response with availability information, as Dennis Fois, president of Vonage’s applications group, shared in a No Jitter briefing on the EC Expo floor. Additional Number Programmability features and functionalities, spanning from the business to the contact center, include the ability to route calls programmatically, enable chatbots, integrate with third-party systems, trigger a transcription service, and more.

With Number Programmability, which is in beta now and slated for general availability this quarter (Q2 2019), Vonage aims to fix the problem of broken communications. Too often, he said, “we’re not building conversations in our interactions.”

Number Programmability “will hopefully give everybody an idea of how much innovation is still to be had with as simple a thing as a phone number,” added Fois, who had been CEO of cloud contact center provider NewVoiceMedia, which Vonage acquired late last year.

Separately at EC, Vonage launched a contact center solution that takes advantage of the NewVoiceMedia technology. The new single-stack offering, called CX Cloud Express, is built on the One Vonage platform and integrates with VBC, Fois said.

Voxbone Announces Tailored Enterprise Platform

Voxbone, historically a platform provider for global communications companies, launched its enterprise platform.

With the platform, businesses will be able to deploy the full range of Voxbone’s functionality from a single touchpoint -- “offering global network reliability and full compliance with local regulations in every market, and scaling costs down as they scale business up,” the company said.

The Voxbone Enterprise Platform provides enterprises with access to:

AT&T Launches API Marketplace

AT&T launched an API Marketplace, for connecting developers and businesses with communications apps. The AT&T API Marketplace, powered by Ribbon Communications’ Kandy platform, gives enterprises access to pre-packaged software code they can use to embed communications capabilities in their websites and applications.

The marketplace offers both turnkey applications and self-service APIs for adding services such as two-factor authentication, conferencing, and click-to-connect voice, video, and text. While the turnkey applications are aimed at enterprises with little to no developer resources, the self-service APIs are available for enterprise customers and developers who prefer to integrate capabilities into their own environments. AT&T is also offering support from its network integration services team to help organizations that want more customized integrations.

“The AT&T API Marketplace underscores the company’s overall strategy helping businesses drive tangible business outcomes through the depth and breadth of communication and collaboration solutions,” said Courtney Munroe, group vice president of Worldwide Telecommunications Research, IDC, in a prepared statement. “Interest in plug-and-play APIs like these is only growing because of their potential to deliver immediate value without a huge investment of time and resources.”

The API Marketplace is available now to businesses and developers in the U.S.

Other Notable CPaaS/APIs News:

Network Management & Networking

Of course, management and monitoring news featured strongly at EC19.

Nectar Intros Next-Gen Monitoring Platform

Nectar Services, a provider of communications monitoring and performance management software, launched its Nectar 10 solution, which correlates metrics and calculated insights across platform, network, and endpoint domains to provide actionable intelligence and enable more efficient management of voice, video, and collaboration environments, Nectar said. It features a new user interface for easier use, can support multivendor UC environments, and takes advantage of the cloud for streamlined management of communications apps and services.

“Platforms built in and for the cloud will bring a new level of value and functionality to voice, video and collaboration networks by simplifying the deployment and management of these UC environments,” said Rich Costello, senior research analyst at IDC, in a prepared statement.

The Nectar 10 platform will be available this month. The initial release will support Cisco collaboration deployments; support for Microsoft and other vendor environments will soon follow, Nectar said.

Voss Unveils Latest Version of VOSS-4-UC

Voss Solutions introduced the latest version of its UC management platform, VOSS-4-UC, which includes a flexible management portal that allows centralized and regional IT control. According to Voss, platform highlights include:

Infovista Enhances Ipanema SD-WAN

Network performance solutions provider Infovista announced that it has enhanced its Ipanema SD-WAN solution with next-generation application intelligence and cloud native orchestration.

Ipanema SD-WAN capabilities include:

Ipanema SD-WAN is available with multitenant management, for managed service providers.

More Notable Network/Management News:

Conclusion

This sampling of news coming out of EC19 encompasses some of the hottest trends in enterprise communications. With the promise of all that’s on the horizon, vendors are no doubt already thinking ahead to Enterprise Connect 2020, taking place March 30 to April 2 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Fla. Mark your calendars!

Beth Schultz, No Jitter editor and Enterprise Connect program co-chair, contributed to this article.