Day: September 29, 2021

8×8 Sets Its Sights on the “VIP” List of Cloud Collaboration Providers

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Communicate

Summary Bullets:

G. Willsky

• Customer Experience as-a-Service (XCaaS) represents the integration of UCaaS/CaaS.

• The chief mission behind XCaaS is raising engagement between employees from all parts of an organization and its customers to optimize the customer experience.

Appearances can be deceiving. In the cloud collaboration market, 8×8 lacks the name recognition afforded rivals such as Facebook, NICE inContact, Google, Slack, or Zoom. But the company stands out as one of the first to offer UCaaS (focused on employee communication and collaboration) integrated with CCaaS (focused on contact center agent interaction). XCaaS, or “Customer Experience as-a-Service” could lift 8×8 from the pool of “wannabes” and onto the VIP list.

Continue reading “8×8 Sets Its Sights on the “VIP” List of Cloud Collaboration Providers” →

Data, Data Everywhere

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Big Data

Summary Bullets:

S. Schuchart

• New analytics around network and application performance are bringing great visibility to administrators

• These new data sources rarely work with other data sources, making piecing together a picture difficult for enterprises

This is the age of analytics. Well, perhaps the computer era has always been the age of analytics, but today we are seeing a lot more discussions of analytics in general. Areas that are particularly suited to analytics are networking, as well as application performance. These areas are particularly suited because they deal with, for the most part, defined and known measurables. For instance, in networking, packet loss, latency, etc. are all known measurables. In application performance monitoring, you can measure application response time, error rates, and number of application instances among other application specific variables. There is a whole market dedicated to application performance monitoring, to say nothing of the newer observability platforms designed to help DevOps practitioners monitor performance.

Continue reading “Data, Data Everywhere” →

VMworld 2021: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Issues Take Center Stage

by Chris Drake, posted in IT Leader

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

  • VMworld 2021 will give greater prominence to ESG issues than any previous VMworld.
  • The challenge for VMware will be to demonstrate real transformation and momentum in its progress towards specific and measurable ESG targets.

At next week’s VMworld 2021, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues look set to receive greater prominence than in any previous year.  Before 2020, VMworld events had only a scattering of professional development; ESG; and diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) sessions but no dedicated track for those topics.  In 2020, VMware introduced the professional development track; and this year, the company plans to expand this track to include DEI and ESG sessions and rename the track to ‘Inspire Change.’ Continue reading “VMworld 2021: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Issues Take Center Stage” →