Category: Communicate

Communicate covers the issues enterprises face in the selection, implementation, and management of business communication and collaboration technology, software, and services.

Zoom Enhancements Help Move Work Forward but Fall Short in Other Areas

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

Summary Bullets:

  • Zoom hopes that this latest round of capabilities will help drive greater platform adoption and distinguish itself from rivals.
  • With respect to achieving those goals, the capabilities deliver Zoom a mixed report card.

Zoom announced a mix of capabilities encompassing mobile access for Zoom My Notes, improved agentic search for Zoom AI Companion and upgrades to Zoom MCP Server. Through the new capabilities, Zoom intends to achieve two implicit goals: to drive platform adoption by adding appealing functionality that aligns with recent market trends and to distinguish itself in a competitively dense field.

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What Was All That Back There, Then? Orange Business Announced 14 Offers at its March Summit

by John Marcus, posted in Big Data, Communicate
A man with dark hair and a slight smile, wearing a black jacket, against a light blue background.
John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services

Summary Bullets:

• In March 2026, Orange Business unveiled 14 innovations at its summit, a mix of new products, major upgrades, and strategic repackaging.

• The summit’s offerings position Orange to lead in secure, sovereign enterprise services, driving market differentiation and revenue growth.

Orange Business was not shy about showing its work at its customer summit in Paris this March. The event generated five separate press releases, and included references to “14 breakthrough innovations” in its launch announcement for a collection of “trusted AI, cloud and secure connectivity” offers. If you weren’t paying attention, you may be forgiven for wondering what was all that back there, then?

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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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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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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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The Middle East Conflict – The Impact on the ASEAN ICT Market

by Alfie Amir, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, Mobilize, Secure
A smiling man in a suit and tie, with short hair, against a white background.
A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• Within the ASEAN enterprise ICT market, the conflict has no direct impact, but indirect effects are becoming increasingly apparent due to the higher crude oil prices and rising electricity costs.

• The industry can expect lower ICT spending, higher operational costs for telcos, and slower AI momentum.

The conflict in the Middle East has entered its third week and is expected to continue for several more weeks. Its impact can already be seen globally across multiple sectors, as discussed in detail in GlobalData’s The Middle East Conflict – Executive Briefing, March 10, 2026.

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The AI Boom and Unintended Consequences

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, Secure
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Service providers, tech companies, and enterprises are under extraordinary pressure to develop and deploy AI solutions.

• Enterprises will need to re-evaluate their goals for the rest of the year, considering cost increases and possible delivery delays.

In the late 1930s, Sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote about unintended consequences, where some of the outcomes of purposeful action are not predicted or intentional. He proposed three types of unintended consequences – unexpected benefit, unexpected drawback, and perverse result. In the first, there is a positive benefit, something good happened that wasn’t foreseen. In the second, an unforeseen detriment occurs. In the third, the result makes the problem worse, a contrarian result.

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Ooredoo Carves Out Fiber and Subsea Unit to Accelerate Regional Connectivity Ambitions

by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
B. Swan

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?

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Sparkle and VDPC Redefine Infrastructure Partnership; Barracuda Swims Between Italy and Spain

by Brendan Swan, posted in Communicate, IT Leader
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

• Sparkle has teamed up with VDPC and private equity firm Teset Capital will build the Barracuda Subsea Cable, a high-capacity subsea cable connecting Spain to Italy.

• Sparkle will acquire the Valencia-Genoa infrastructure and Valencia co-location, boosting its connectivity across the Iberian Peninsula.

In today’s interconnected world, subsea cables are the unseen arteries that power global communications with underwater cables carrying approximately 99% of the world’s internet traffic across continents. As operators collaborate to expand their network infrastructure, the recent announcement between wholesale network provider, Sparkle and Spanish telecommunications provider, Valencia Digital Port Connect (VDPC) highlights how strategic collaborations between infrastructure players continue to shape the future of digital connectivity. But as ownership of Sparkle is about to change, could this influence its long-term role in global infrastructure?

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