Cloud service providers claim to have high uptimes, often touting five-nines reliability, but we've seen how cloud outages from
Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
Microsoft's Azure impact enterprise communications and collaborations over the last several years. A downed cloud isn't just an inconvenience; it can cost enterprises productivity and potential business. To address the cloud reliability conundrum, UJET recently released its CX Intercloud service, which provides application redundancy for UJET contact center platforms running on multiple public clouds. And today, Enterprise Connect recognized UJET and the service, naming it the 2022 winner of the Overall Best of Enterprise Connect Award.
With CX Intercloud, UJET customers can pre-deploy a UJET instance across multiple cloud platforms, including Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, as
we reported in this article. In the event of a failure, CX Intercloud will be able to switch its loads from one cloud provider to another.
Best of Enterprise Connect judge Elka Popova, VP and senior fellow at Frost & Sullivan, said that UJET stood out because of its “focus [on the] bells & whistles ... of customer experience (CX) management.” Not only does UJET automate simpler customer engagement with customer insights, but it also provides smartphone capabilities for user authentication and verification, Popova added.
"But excellent CX management also requires exceptional service quality and reliability, and this is where UJET's novel CX Intercloud solution design delivers highly differentiated value," Popova said. "UJET’s Dynamic Service Mesh architecture enabling an Active-Active design across public clouds and guarantees 100% service uptime — a rarely promised, and even more rarely delivered, capability in the cloud services industry."
This year’s finalists for the Overall Best in Enterprise Connect award also include:
- Amazon Web Services: The recently launched Automated Chatbot Design for Amazon Lex allows users to design conversational bots with existing conversation transcripts.
- Five9: The company was nominated as a finalist for the latest version of its AI-based Agent Assist capability, powered by Google CCAI, that provides call transcripts and summaries.
- IntelePeer: Atmosphere Marketplace is a bundled multi-app service that features no-code/low-code applications.
- RingCentral: The company was nominated a finalist for the second phase of its meeting summaries.
- Zoom: Zoom Events is an all-in-one platform for events that provides event hosts with a host of interactive event elements like networking events, attendee chats, sponsorship support, and more.
In addition to naming the winner for the Overall category, Enterprise Connect revealed winners and runner ups for the other four categories.
For the Best Innovation in Customer Experience category, it was a four-way tie between:
- 8x8: The company was nominated for its Agent Workspace service, which was revelated last week. Agent Workspace is a browser-based contact center omnichannel service designed to support remote and hybrid work environments.
- IntelePeer: The company was awarded for the aforementioned Atmosphere Marketplace.
- Journey: The company was nominated for its Journey Identity Pipelines product.
- LiveVox: SpeechIQ with Quality Management is a multi-channel interaction analytics platform with quality management tools.
For the Most Innovative Use of AI, the winner was Virsae for its cloud-based dashboard service that captures and analyzes performance and technical data in unmanaged work-from-home environments. The runner-up in the AI category is Thrio for ThrioRedact, a data loss prevention capability that redacts personally identifiable information for security and privacy compliance purposes.
For the Best Innovation for Virtual Meetings, it was a two-way tie between:
- BlueJeans by Verizon: BlueJeans Studio is a set of production tools that allow event hosts on BlueJeans Events to record and produce live streams.
- Vonage: The company won for a product that’ll be announced next month.
Lastly, for the Best Innovation for Meeting Rooms, Enterprise Connect revealed that DTEN has won the category with the DTEN Onboard. Additionally, Zoom was a runner-up in the category for its aforementioned
Zoom Events service.
To determine this year’s winner, Enterprise Connect created a panel of leading communications/collaboration consultant and analyst, which included:
- Robin Gareiss, CEO and principal analyst, Metrigy
- Robert Harris, president, Communications Advantage
- Steve Leaden, president and founder, Leaden Associates
- Elka Popova, VP and senior fellow, Frost & Sullivan
“It is amazing how much innovation has taken place in the industry despite the challenges and disruption of the pandemic. Innovation spans the front end (i.e., user experience), back end (i.e., solution admin experience) and the underlying architecture of the competing solutions,” Popova said, commenting on this year’s awards program. “AI and APIs/programmability clearly stand out as the key enabling technologies powering innovation across solutions and markets today. Based on what we’ve seen so far this year, there’s a lot more exciting innovation coming in the next few months and years.”
“The Best of Enterprise Connect award winners and finalists all demonstrate the high level and vibrant pace of innovation occurring in enterprise communications and collaboration technology,” said Eric Krapf, Enterprise Connect GM and program co-chair. “We congratulate all the winners and finalists for delivering on the promise of communications/collaboration technology at a time when enterprises continually need to improve their own customer and employee experiences.”
To stay on top of all the Enterprise Connect-related news, make sure to check back into No Jitter regularly and visit the
Enterprise Connect 2022 page.
