It's been about a month since the last No Jitter Roll, but with Enterprise Connect Orlando 2017 now a week behind us we're back in action to catch you up on some of the latest in enterprise communications.
Twilio Rolls Out New Features
Hot off its first Enterprise Connect keynote with CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson (view keynote here), Twilio this week announced its newest API, Programmable Fax. The API allows developers to programmatically send and receive faxes using Twilio between any software application and a traditional fax machine.
As explained in a Twilio Blog post from content manager Kyle Kelly-Yahner, "The technology that brings you on-demand food in 5 minutes is new. The fax machine that printed out your order at the restaurant is not." Many different organizations, from pizza shops to the FBI, still use fax, Kelly-Yahner explained. With its Programmable Fax API, available in beta, Twilio aims to make fax more flexible to meet the demands of the new software-driven enterprise. Twilio supports outbound faxing globally, and is rolling out support for programmable faxing on its inventory of voice-enabled inbound phone numbers. It said it will first enable U.S. and Canada numbers, with the rest to follow this month.
In other news, Twilio has introduced enhanced Answering Machine Detection (AMD), a feature for its Programmable Voice offering. As Twilio sales engineer Andrew Jordan wrote in a Twilio Blog post, AMD determines if a person, answering machine, or fax has picked up a call so that the caller can deliver the appropriate message. The new feature relies on a machine learning algorithm trained on thousands of call samples, resulting in a 94% accuracy rate. Twilio's goal with this feature is to enable organizations to create the best possible customer experience, while also gaining data about how often an outbound call is picked up by humans versus machines.
Separately, Twilio announced its new IN1 data center in Mumbai is now providing network traversal service to India, a new region for the company. Further, Twilio announced availability of its phone numbers in 12 new countries. For local voice, it has added availability in Croatia, Hungary, Iceland, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, and Slovenia; and for mobile SMS, in Latvia, Portugal, Republic of Korea, and Taiwan.
Facebook Ups Team Collaboration Ante
Team collaboration, a hot topic at Enterprise Connect (see, "Enterprise IT on Team Collaboration: 'More Security, Please!'"), got some attention this week around Facebook. The company apparently is testing a free version of its enterprise team collaboration app, Workplace, Business Insider reported.
This free "Standard" edition reportedly will provide much of the same functionality as the paid version, except for a lack of certain security controls. This move, which follows on Work Chat message app enhancements, seems to be a competitive play against Microsoft, with its recently released Teams and expanding Skype for Business in Office 365 solution, and Google, with its recently introduced Hangouts Chat & Meetings, not to mention Slack.
I think it's fair to say that the buzz around team collaboration we saw take off at Enterprise Connect will surely only continue to grow as this space gets increasingly crowded and competitive. Perhaps by the time Enterprise Connect 2018 rolls around we'll have a better sense of which companies will come out on top.
Workato Partners with RingCentral
Integration and automation platform Workato has partnered with cloud communications provider RingCentral to enable enterprise organizations to integrate RingCentral into business workflows. The goal is to provide a full view of customer data across business applications to enable customer support teams to resolve issues faster and sales teams to improve productivity and results, Workato said.
For example, say a call comes through RingCentral from an existing customer contact. Workato pulls data from applications like Zendesk, Jira, and ServiceNow to surface insights and provide the customer service agent with fuller context for the call. After the call completes, Workato logs it in the company's CRM application (for example, Salesforce, Insightly, or HubSpot), and can then use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics to send out a survey to the caller and gather customer feedback.
In addition, if an individual misses a call, Workato will notify the intended recipient via a text message providing the caller's contact information. Currently, this SMS capability is available in the U.S., for missed international calls, Workato sends notifications via email.
Genesys Goes In on Compliance
Omnichannel contact center provider Genesys announced this week that its PureCloud by Genesys solution has achieved PCI DSS Service Provider Level 2 certification, as validated by an accredited third party. In other words, Genesys is making it easier for its customers to have confidence that it meets the stringent requirements for protecting consumer credit card data.
Genesys is on a mission to make its PureCloud offering the "most secure cloud solution available to customers," said EVP and managing director Deepak Advani, in a prepared statement. "Rigorous security procedures are absolutely essential in a complex operational environment where hundreds of people interact with sensitive data every day."
LogMeIn Integrates Portfolio
Following the February merger between LogMeIn and the GoTo family of products, LogMeIn this week announced the first integration, bringing together the functionality of separate products. It has integrated OpenVoice and join.me, which means that join.me is now included alongside GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining as LogMeIn products leveraging the OpenVoice technology, the press materials state. This integration allows customers the ability to incorporate a toll-free dial-in option into meetings so meeting attendees no longer have to bear any cost.
Since the combination of the portfolio, LogMeIn reports supporting 20 million users, more than 7 million meetings per month comprising more than 900 million conferencing minutes, and 12 billion voice minutes per year.
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