No Jitter Roll: Five for Friday 2018-09-21No Jitter Roll: Five for Friday 2018-09-21
A look at news from Salesforce, Natterbox, Testfire Labs, AppNeta, and TetraVX
September 21, 2018
In this week's No Jitter Roll, we look at announcements around artificial intelligence (AI) for CRM and meetings, network monitoring, and a managed services acquisition.
Salesforce Intros Einstein Voice
With Salesforce's Dreamforce conference taking place next week, it comes as no surprise that we're hearing lots of news this week related to leveraging AI around CRM. The first news item of this ilk comes from Salesforce itself, which announced its new platform service offering called Einstein Voice.
The platform service consists of two parts:
Einstein Voice Assistant, which lets users make conversational updates to Salesforce records (data entry) as well as explore Salesforce dashboards via voice commands; additionally, users can get personalized daily briefings, or "tailored readouts," of important Salesforce metrics and priorities
Einstein Voice Bots, which lets Salesforce admins build their own customer-facing and Salesforce-connected voice bots -- "with clicks, not code," Salesforce said. Customers can deploy these bots on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and additionally, customize them with corporate branding.
"We're in the midst of an incredible technological shift, where the power of voice is fundamentally changing the way we work," said Parker Harris, co-founder and CTO at Salesforce, in a prepared statement. Einstein Voice is aimed at ushering in "a new era of conversational CRM, delivering new levels of productivity and redefining customer experiences with voice technology," he added.
Natterbox Teams with Salesforce
In other Salesforce-related news, voice cloud services provider Natterbox announced it will be the first telephony provider available through Salesforce Community Cloud. Customers will be able to enable and set access controls for the Natterbox computer-telephony-integration (CTI) application from within Community Cloud. Joint customers will be able to capture and track all telemarketing activity directly in Salesforce alongside other CRM data.
"Having a better understanding of the activity behind outputs is something our customers have been calling out for, for a while," said Natterbox CTO Neil Burgess, in a prepared statement. "With the Natterbox-Salesforce integration, he added, customers will gain greater visibility into how their community uses voice to follow up on leads, which leads to enhanced accountability and ultimately better marketing investment decisions.
The Natterbox application is now available to Natterbox customers in Salesforce Communities.
Testfire Labs Debuts Hendrix AI Assistant
Testfire Labs, a developer of AI enterprise productivity tools, this week announced availability of its flagship product, Hendrix.ai, a natural-language AI assistant for business meetings. Hendrix can attend meetings, transcribe meeting summaries and action items, and archive these notes in a searchable dashboard that also showcases a personalized meeting history and other insights about the user.
Following on a beta test involving more than 100 organizations, this release includes:
Enhanced reliability -- ensured by new testing and monitoring protocols
Fast summary delivery -- sent to user email inboxes and the dashboard within 24 hours of the meeting
Dashboard control -- now includes a dashboard for Hendrix "himself," with a searchable history, meeting statistics, and management capabilities
Editable transcripts -- enabling users with full editing control over meeting summaries created by Hendrix, for adding content, adjusting text or flagging certain items
Hendrix.ai is available in North America via an enrollment website, with subscriptions including a free version, a 14-day trial, and paid versions starting at $39 per month.
AppNeta Tackles Monitoring for Cloud-First Enterprises
AppNeta, a network performance monitoring provider specializing in the end-user perspective, this week announced a series of enhancements aimed at catering to the demands of cloud-first enterprises. AppNeta Performance Manager now provides native support for the Azure Cloud and IBM Cloud platforms, along with:
More deployment options that include a range of performance analysis modes, multiple connectivity options for wireless and wired networks, and a new suite of monitoring points that scale up to 100 Gbps
Centralized management and deployment options for auto-deployment and auto-configuration
Automatic Border Gateway Protocol analysis, to augment continuous network path testing and active Domain Name System monitoring for trend analysis around response times and impact on end users
Improved software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) support, enabling contextualized application performance before, during, and after SD-WAN deployments
TetraVX Acquires Co-Mergent, Adds Professional Services
TetraVX, a UCC company specializing in the delivery of cloud-based solutions, earlier this week announced its acquisition of Co-Mergent, a provider of Microsoft Intelligence Communications Management and Monitoring services.
With the acquisition, TetraVX gains Co-Mergent's AlertPro365, an enterprise monitoring and analytics platform built for cloud-based Microsoft solutions like Skype for Business Online, Teams, as well as TetraVX's sVX (which is powered by Skype for Business). AlertPro365 includes active monitoring capabilities for multi-vendor network ecosystems, and features a centralized management platform that provides alerts and reports to IT departments with issue resolution details.
With AlertPro365, TetraVX is better positioned not only to assist with quality testing for Teams migrations, but also with licensing and necessary training, TetraVX said.
As part of the acquisition, Co-Mergent CEO John Dusek will join the TetraVX leadership team and all other staff will be folded into TetraVX's organization.
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