Summary Bullets:

• By marrying team collaboration and productivity tools, Microsoft has achieved a degree of differentiation that is largely unmatched.
• Microsoft would be wise to integrate its team collaboration and contact center capabilities.

Last week, Microsoft held its annual ‘Ignite’ event, a showcase for enhancements across the entire Microsoft portfolio. Not surprisingly artificial intelligence (AI) occupied center stage. A portion of the enhancements unveiled impacted team collaboration/hybrid work.

Summary Bullets:

• A history of offers that are difficult to distinguish is a significant hurdle holding back Microsoft in the contact center space.

• Implementing a definitive flagship contact center offer coupled with Microsoft Teams would go far in alleviating competitive pressure.

Microsoft tore the wrapping paper from its latest contact center offer with the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center on July 1, 2024. When it comes to Microsoft, contact center is the gift that keeps on giving. Pre-dating this new arrival is a string of ancestors born annually, featuring overlapping functionality and sometimes bearing similar names. Sorting through the morass is confusing.

Summary Bullets:

• After almost a decade in the market, Meta is closing its team collaboration platform named Workplace.

• Workplace users have a two-year horizon to depart the platform.

It’s official. Workplace, Meta’s team collaboration platform, will not last for even a decade. The platform succumbed to more pressing corporate priorities and unrelenting competition from marquee players. Although Workplace is not going anywhere immediately, the decision to shutter the platform that was launched in 2016 has been made and the timeline for its demise has been cast.

Summary Bullets:

• With these latest announcements, Zoom continues the rapid build out of its GenAI portfolio.

• The advent of GenAI has leveled the playing field between Zoom and rivals such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google.

Zoom continues to aggressively expand its portfolio of AI capabilities with a new round of features targeted at admins, contact center agents, and meeting participants. The features are part of ‘Zoom AI Companion,’ a generative AI (GenAI) assistant launched in September 2023. Zoom AI Companion is available at no additional cost for customers with paid services assigned to their Zoom user accounts.

Summary Bullets:

• The pandemic drove the ascent of cloud-based collaboration platforms, and the ripple effects are still being felt today.

• In 2024, AI – along with the contact center, hybrid work, and mobility – will witness important new dynamics.

Recently, dramatic winds of change have swept across cloud-based collaboration platforms. The pandemic drove the ascent of these platforms and competitors battled in successive rounds of feature enhancements. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and a ‘truce’ was issued in the form of interoperability between rival platforms. In 2023, things came full circle with competitors reaching deep into AI’s treasure trove and circulating AI features platform-wide. However, AI was not the only force shaping the landscape. 2024 promises to be as exciting as 2023. Along with AI, GlobalData expects contact center, hybrid work, and mobility to witness important new dynamics.

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8 is positioning the new video meeting features well in the age of GenAI.

• The introduction is tarnished somewhat by the late arrival to market.

8×8 has announced the addition of AI-generated transcriptions, summaries, and action items for video meetings to its experience communications-as-a-service (XCaaS) platform. XCaaS melds communication/collaboration (UCaaS) and contact center (CCaaS) capabilities. 8×8 introduced the ‘XCaaS’ platform nearly three years ago in May 2021. The platform is noteworthy having served as a blueprint since then for competitors to offer their own integrated UCaaS/CCaaS offers, and customers have come to expect these as part of vendor portfolios. In this regard, 8×8 has been a trend-setter.

Summary Bullets:

• Unify provides Mitel a larger, more heterogeneous customer base, additional markets and offers, and stronger routes to market.

• Of several drawbacks the largest is that Mitel’s core strategy remains unchanged.

Mitel completed the acquisition of the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) and communication and collaboration services (CCS) services unit of the Atos group (Unify) announced in January 2023. The acquisition inflates and diversifies Mitel’s customer base, extends its geographic coverage, broadens its offer portfolio, and enhances its go-to-market capabilities.

Summary Bullets:

• The positioning of new Slack capabilities at the Dreamforce keynote was underwhelming, lacking cohesiveness and clarity.

• Slack will land on more solid footing if it can craft an AI message as compelling as its productivity message.

During the keynote of last week’s ‘Dreamforce’ event sponsored by Salesforce, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones updated the audience regarding new and forthcoming capabilities on the Slack platform. With a portion of the capabilities saturated with game-changing AI technology and Dreamforce serving as Salesforce’s showcase event, the update was no doubt intended to tantalize but instead was underwhelming.