RingCentral’s Expanded Partnerships with Cox and Spectrum Position Each for Growth in the Contact Center Space and Beyond

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
Close-up portrait of a smiling man with glasses, wearing a light-colored suit.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • RingCentral has expanded its partnerships with Cox Business and Spectrum Business by augmenting existing unified communications offers with contact center capabilities.
  • Now is an especially opportune time to expand the partnerships as organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections.

RingCentral has recently expanded its partnership with two service providers by supplying contact center capabilities for their portfolios. ‘Cox Business Contact Center with RingCentral’ and ‘Unified Customer Experience (UCX) with RingCentral’ from Spectrum Business both leverage RingCentral’s ‘RingCX’ platform, which is AI-driven and omnichannel capable. Both offers complement existing unified communications (UC) offers brought to market in conjunction with RingCentral based on its ‘RingEX’ platform namely, ‘Cox Business Connect with RingCentral’ and from Spectrum Business, ‘Unified Communications (UC) with RingCentral’. Spectrum Business sweetens the deal by blending in a sales-oriented add-on from RingCentral to its UC offer called AI Conversation Expert (ACE), which transcribes and analyzes sales calls and meetings to help close more opportunities.

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You Can’t Look Away From IT

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
Close-up portrait of a balding man with glasses and a distinctive mustache, smiling warmly.
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Agentic AI could have been rolled out more gradually, with actual cybersecurity protection, including data protection, regulatory compliance, and responsibility tracking.

• AI and agentic AI are here to stay, but it’s up to customers to pump the brakes and ensure they don’t implement a technology that leaves them vulnerable to attack in ways that even AI’s creators can’t fully envision.

RSAC 2026 concluded last week, and it was a firestorm of AI and agentic AI announcements, products, services, and marketing. The mood on the show floor was positive, the majority of people crowding around interesting demos and informational sessions. And of course, good booth prizes and tchotchkes. Cybersecurity vendors and service providers paid out for lavish booths and even the smaller booths were mostly cleverly decorated/marketed.

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Akamai Research Shows AI-Powered Attacks are Targeting Undersecured APIs

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
Headshot of a woman with long blonde hair, wearing a black jacket over a beige sweater, smiling against a light blue background.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• APIs are an alluring target for threat actors now with the average number of daily API attacks soaring by 113% versus last year.

• More than 60% of the attacks in 2025 were affiliated with unauthorized workflows and activity that veered from the norm; indicators that are cybercriminals shifted from conventional web breaches to behavior-based incidents.

AI is changing the threat landscape, and it is doing so at lightning speed. Aggressive threat actors are putting the technology to work to expedite endpoint discovery and improve overall efficiencies. This has left enterprises flat-footed, often missing breaches until the real losses are finally discovered.

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A Unified Network for IT and OT Delivers Efficiency and Creates Opportunity for Service Providers

by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, Secure
A professional portrait of a man with short black hair, wearing a dark blazer over a light shirt, standing in front of a blurred glass background.
S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • Businesses are modernizing their IT and digitizing their operations. The case of IT and OT convergence is becoming stronger, and this should extend to the underlying network infrastructure.
  • Network services providers can capture this opportunity by strengthening their professional services and focus on business outcomes.

Businesses are constantly looking for automation and efficiency to improve their speed of operations while lowering costs. Technology is a key driver. Much attention on digital transformation has been on information technology (IT), in the form of migrating workloads to the cloud for agility, leveraging data analytics for business insights, and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for automation.

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EY Survey Reveals Enterprises are Investing in AI to Repel Adversaries Weaponizing the Very Same Technology

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
A professional portrait of a woman with long blonde hair, wearing a black jacket and a light-colored top, smiling against a soft blue background.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• Ninety-six percent of the security leaders surveyed see AI as a core element in their cybersecurity strategy that they are already deploying

• However, that same number perceive AI-driven attacks as serious threats to their organization

Cybersecurity is a delicate balancing act, requiring organizations to mount multi-layered defenses without causing the kind of friction that can impede productivity. An effective defense also requires the adequate funding to ensure the appropriate technical and personnel resources are in place to protect enterprise assets. With AI as an active part of the cybersecurity conversation, there are more angles for IT organizations to consider as both a proactive tool and an offensive weapon.

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RingCentral AIR Pro Is a Meaningful Addition to the Company’s Contact Center Portfolio but Suffers from a Foggy Roadmap

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
Close-up portrait of a man wearing glasses, smiling against a blurred background.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• RingCentral AIR Pro is the latest member of RingCentral’s agentic AI ecosystem.

• The offer keeps RingCentral neck-and-neck with rivals, but the omission of launch details dilutes its appeal to the market.

Today, organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centers have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact center’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centers are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents; from reactive to proactive; from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented; and from generic to deeply personalized.

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GSA’s Latest Private Wireless Market Tracker Notes 5G Acceleration – and Caution

by John Marcus, posted in Internet of Things, Mobilize, Network
A headshot of a man with short dark hair, wearing a black collared shirt, smiling against a light blue background.
John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services.

Summary Bullets:

• GSA customer numbers for Q4 2025 show private 5G network traction continuing, driven by repeatable, vertical-specific use cases in manufacturing, mining, and campuses.

• 2026 momentum hinges on pragmatic LTE-to-5G evolution, spectrum clarity, and ROI-focused rollouts amid supply-chain and macro risks.

The Global mobile Supplier Association (GSA)’s Q4 2025 snapshot on private 4G/5G, published in February 2026, suggests it is a market that remains relevant only to certain enterprise segments, while also being more firmly established. With over 2,000 customers of GSA member companies tracked by year-end 2025, one can infer the increasing normalcy of cellular as an enterprise connectivity platform for operations, safety, and automation. Most organizations have more than one private network deployed, (almost) each of which generated revenues exceeding EUR100,000.

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Geopolitical Conflicts Driving New Resilience Imperative for Critical Infrastructure

by Dustin Kehoe, posted in Secure
A smiling middle-aged man in a suit and tie, standing in front of a blue background with digital patterns.
D. Kehoe

Summary Bullets:

• Geopolitical conflicts are forcing providers of critical national infrastructure to revisit and double down on the securing of supply chain to reduce operational risks and improve auditability.

• This is forcing businesses to unify cyber security with enterprise-wide operational resiliency. This is both the highest priority and greatest challenge.

In times of war, a rise of nationalism, global tariffs, and market volatility, mixed in with unhealthy doses of geopolitical tensions, state-assisted cyber-attacks targeting critical national infrastructure (CNI) are on the rise. Unlike other sectors, CNI are the core systems that underpin the functioning or delivery of essential services. CNI is also vital for the running of the economy. Major sectors such as transportation, utilities (e.g., energy, water), banking, health care, government services, telecoms, etc. fall within this group. While these sectors have always been required to guarantee confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information crucial to their operations at a higher standard compared to other sectors, it is the supply chain which is the weakest link. This has the greatest number of threat vectors from brute-force attacks, exploitation of software vulnerabilities to various strains of malware and ransomware attacks happens here.

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8×8’s New Customer Experience Capabilities are Contemporary but Confusing

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Communicate, IT Leader
A smiling man wearing glasses, with short dark hair, against a blurred background.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8’s latest capabilities reflect an ongoing pivot from collaboration occupying its core to customer experience (CX) assuming its central identity.

• While 8×8 is generating market momentum with the new capabilities, the offer structure is confusing.

A few years ago, 8×8 undertook a fundamental pivot, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with CX making up its central identity. Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities – is now known as the 8×8 Platform for CX.

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Zoom’s New Agentic AI Capabilities Fuel a Rejuvenation of Its Platform and the Company

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
Close-up portrait of a smiling man with glasses, wearing a suit.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • Zoom introduced capabilities that reflect a trend of AI moving from use in silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale.
  • In addition, Zoom’s new capabilities extend a dramatic transformation that has been taking place at the company over recent years.

Zoom introduced a wide host of features that meaningfully expand its agentic AI platform. The enhancements span Zoom Workplace, Zoom Phone, and Zoom CX. At the heart lies workflow automation embedded into meetings, calls, chat, and contact center interactions so that conversations trigger action across an enterprise’s systems.

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