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.

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

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.

Continue reading “Zoom’s New Agentic AI Capabilities Fuel a Rejuvenation of Its Platform and the Company” →

Summary Bullets:

• Ooredoo Group launches Ooredoo Fibre Networks, an independent entity dedicated to managing and scaling Ooredoo’s international connectivity and submarine cable infrastructure ambitions.

• By establishing a new entity, Ooredoo can be financially independent from its domestic operations, enabling it to be more transparent to present and future investors.

As global bandwidth demand surges and AI-driven cloud expansion continues to reshape traditional global traffic corridors, Ooredoo’s decision to establish a standalone business dedicated to international subsea cable and terrestrial fiber connectivity signals a shift in strategic intent. Rather than simply expanding capacity, the carrier appears to be reorganizing its infrastructure to compete more assertively in the wholesale and transit arena, where scale, route diversity, and commercial agility increasingly define market leadership. In a region that is fast-emerging as a key route, is Ooredoo positioning itself to evolve from a multi-national connectivity provider into the Middle East’s regional connectivity powerhouse?

Continue reading “Ooredoo Carves Out Fiber and Subsea Unit to Accelerate Regional Connectivity Ambitions” →

Summary Bullets:

• Slack has been given a new lease on life from its parent Salesforce, serving as a frontend for the platform.

• It is not yet time to include Slack in the discussion along with rivals, but the company merits keeping a close eye on.

When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28 billion, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. After all, Slack was a second-tier player in the team collaboration space while Salesforce was a premier provider of customer resource management (CRM) technology and a captain of industry at large. Surely, the acquisition would follow the familiar pattern of so many, which preceded it with a ‘big fish’ gobbling up a ‘little fish’ never to be heard from again. For certain, Slack would be stripped of its brand name, and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforce’s massive stockpile. Well, quite the opposite happened. Slack has not only survived – it has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

Continue reading “Slack Has Landed a Starring Role at Salesforce” →

Summary Bullets:

• SubCo will establish a trans-pacific submarine cable project dubbed ‘APX East’ that will directly connect Australia with mainland US.

• While Australia already has sovereign owned cables, it’s crucial that this type of infrastructure remains in domestic ownership to ensure data sovereignty is met.

Over the last few years, international connectivity strategies have largely been driven by scale – favoring bigger pipes, alternative routes, and the assumption that capacity would keep pace with demand. However, with the rise in data traffic contributed by AI, data-intensive workloads, and diminishing tolerance for outages, this is forcing carriers to rethink how international networks are designed and evaluated.

Continue reading “Subco’s APX Cable: A Strategic Asset for Australia’s Digital Future” →