This week has been an interesting one politically, with the presidential election causing waves here in the U.S. and around the globe. But let's put politics aside for the moment, and dive into what's been happening in communications technology this week.
UCaaS Advancements
In last week's No Jitter Roll, we touched on BroadSoft's acquisition of VoIP Logic, a wholesale provider of BroadSoft's BroadWorks-based cloud communications services. This week we turn to a product introduction, BroadSoft Business, an integrated portfolio of cloud PBX, UC, team collaboration, and contact center applications.
A multi-tenant UCaaS solution, BroadSoft Business is designed to scale for use by SMBs and large enterprises alike, BroadSoft said in the press release. It's made up of three core applications: UC-One, a mobile-first UC app; Team-One, for persistent team workspaces; and CC-One, a cloud contact center solution. Contextual intelligence will be built in across the platform, supported by BroadSoft Hub.
"Today's workforce is overwhelmed by information, messages and notifications from dozens of business applications that do not connect with one another," said Taher Behbehani, chief digital and marketing officer of BroadSoft, in a prepared statement. "BroadSoft Business addresses this challenge by integrating multiple core business applications and communications within a single cloud platform so that individuals, teams and organizations can work smarter."
With BroadSoft's Connections event taking place next week in San Antonio, we may soon be hearing even more developments coming out of the company. We'll have to stay tuned.
In other UCaaS news... cloud-based business communications provider RingCentral this week announced milestones of its Connect Platform. RingCentral said its Connect Platform now has more than 350 custom application integrations as well as 60 "off-the-shelf" integrations with third-party business applications that include Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, among others. RingCentral reports that its Connect Platform receives 1.6 million API requests daily.
"... our vision extends beyond connecting today's workforce and all the devices they use," said David Lee, vice president of platform at RingCentral, in a prepared statement. "It also means easily integrating communication solutions and business applications to improve productivity and business workflow to better serve their customers."
As the company works to continue its expansion of its Connect platform, ISVs and developers who are not customers of RingCentral can now receive free developer accounts, which provides access to all RingCentral's APIs, SDKs, and other developer tools, the company said.
On the SD-WAN front
Software-defined WAN comes back into focus this week with a number of announcements. First on the docket, InfoVista, a network performance orchestration solutions provider, announced a cloud-based version of its management platform for Ipanema, its application-aware SD-WAN solution. The IpanemaGo service management platform gives enterprises the ability to address application performance on a per-session, per-user basis, and "speeds up the creation of proof-of-concept environments, removing risk, and reducing overhead and operating costs when onboarding new customers," the company said. In addition, IpanemaGo provides a simple Web interface for VARs and MSPs to use in deploying, operating, and managing the Ipanema solution.
Second, SD-WAN vendor Viptela and network visualization company LiveAction announced they have partnered and integrated Viptela's Secure Extensible Network (SEN) platform with LiveAction's LiveNX solution in order to provide end-to-end network visibility for enterprises engaged in SD-WAN deployment planning, operation, and service assurance.
For background, Viptela's SEN platform lets enterprises mix and match private and public IP connections including MPLS, broadband, Ethernet, and wireless LTE/4G to meet application requirements according to geographic location, bandwidth, and other factors. LiveNX is a visualization and analytics engine for monitoring network data in real time and retrospectively. With the Viptela-LiveAction integration, enterprises should be able to manage the full lifecycle of their SD-WAN deployments.
"The Viptela-LiveAction partnership provides customers the visibility and agility they need to quickly identify and fix problems before they can impact network performance and business operations," said Viptela's Ramesh Prabagaran, VP of product management and partnerships, in a prepared statement.
Third, BT announced that it would be increasing its investment in dynamic network services through a series of integrations that "will make it easier, faster and safer for organizations to move towards a cloud-based IT consumption model and succeed in their ambitious digital transformation journeys.".
As such, BT has selected Nuage Networks technology for use in delivering an SD-WAN service due for release in early 2017. Alongside its SD-WAN offering, BT's portfolio will leverage NFV and SDN to help it deliver the "broadest possible range of network services to customers to meet their diverse connectivity needs."
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