No Jitter Roll: Five for Friday

This week’s edition of our regular news roundup features announcements around artificial intelligence (AI), speech analytics, cloud communications, mobility, team collaboration workflows, and content sharing.

 

Revation Systems, a cloud communications provider that targets healthcare and banking, this week announced the latest release of its flagship platform, LinkLive 9.0. The release includes a feature called Reva Agent Advisor, which allows agents to access real-time analytics on their vocal tones, moods, and sentiment conveyed in their customer or patient interactions. Agents can then use this information to tweak how they converse and make sure they deliver a good customer experience.

 

In addition to helping the agents, the tone analysis data feeds into Revation’s LinkLive reports, providing contact center managers with a visual display of statistics to monitor individual agent and team performance.

 

Other enhancements in the 9.0 release include Reva Agent Connect, which uses AI and CRM data to route call and text interactions to appropriate agents, and a desktop recording and playback capability that lets agents and supervisors play back and share with a customer or patient, Revation said.

 

With this release, Revation also announced its renewal of the Health Information Trust Alliance Common Security Framework certification across its company.

 

MessageBird, a cloud communications platform provider, and SparkPost, an email delivery and analytics platform provider, this week announced a strategic partnership to “extend the communications channels available to businesses,” the companies said in a joint press release.

 

Specifically, SparkPost will extend MessageBird’s platform to its customers to provide them access to a broader range of communications solutions for sending messages. And MessageBird will make SparkPost email available to its customers via its Programmable Conversations API, which unifies interactions across multiple channels into a single conversation thread, the companies said.

 

This expands the channels that MessageBird supports via its platform, aiding the company’s mission to “make communicating with a business feel as natural as communicating with a friend,” as MessageBird CEO and founder Robert Vis said in a prepared statement.

 

Tango Networks, an enterprise mobility provider, this week announced Kinetic Cloud Mobile-X, a communications service that creates an enterprise-controlled private mobile network.

 

Previously, mobile voice, messaging, and data have been controlled by the mobile operators. By enabling enterprises to bring mobile services into the control of their existing call control platforms, Tango said it aims to help enterprises maximize productivity among distributed workforces.

 

Kinetic Cloud Mobile-X features include:

 

 

Polly, a provider of survey software for team collaboration solutions, this week announced that it has raised $7 million in a Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from existing seed investors the Slack Fund, Amplify Partners, and Fathom Capital. It will use the money to expand its product and go-to-market teams, the company said in a press release.

 

Polly, founded in 2015 by Microsoft engineers, works with team collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, providing a way for enterprises to efficiently gather feedback through integrated surveys. Enterprises can use these surveys to measure workflows and iterate to improve employee and customer experiences, Polly said.

 

“The Polly team has taken a simple idea -- surveys inside of Slack -- and created a whole new way of collecting people-powered data on modern communication platforms,” said Sudip Chakrabarti, partner at Madrona Venture Group, in a prepared statement. “As modern workflows move to real-time messaging platforms, Polly enables enterprises to get a holistic picture of their customers, employees, product and brand."

 

As part of the funding, Chakrabarti will join Polly’s board of directors.

 

Mersive, a wireless content sharing and collaboration solution provider, last week announced a new hardware platform, called Gen3 Pod hardware, and version 4.0 of its Solstice software. Combined, these extend Mersive’s platform-based approach to meeting space collaboration through the addition of new capabilities that eliminate the complexity and associated costs of multiple niche solutions, the company said.

 

The new hardware introduces ShareSwitch and an HDMI port for sharing and controlling wireless and wired content sharing. The Gen3 Pod includes dual-HDMI output -- for single 4K or dual 1080p displays -- and Power over Ethernet plus (PoE+). The 4.0 software version boosts connectivity, playback, and sharing performance, Mersive said.

 

Solstice 4.0 also includes Solstice Ink, which allows users to highlight and mark-up displayed content from anywhere in the meeting room by pointing and drawing with a smartphone. Additionally, Mersive has expanded its international language support to 16 languages.

 

With these upgrades, pricing for the Solstice Pod will increase by $100 to $1,399.