No Jitter Roll: UCaaS Expansion, SD-WAN Report

This week’s No Jitter Roll provides an update on a UCaaS partnership; video and speech recognition integrations; remote contact center capabilities, and an SD-WAN market report.

 

Avaya and RingCentral this week reported the expansion of Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) by RingCentral into Europe, with availability in France, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Previously, the cloud platform had been available in the U.S. (since March), and Australia, Canada, and the U.K. (since June).

 

In addition, Avaya and RingCentral announced that new capabilities are now available with ACO. These include Avaya-branded video, a unified desktop application, adoption and usage analytics, administrative and security controls, as well as network performance.

 

Amid a variety of cloud CRM-related news, Oracle announced the marriage between its Fusion Cloud CX applications and Zoom, to enable integration of video into marketing, sales, and customer service workflows. Specifically, the Zoom integration is available for Oracle Eloqua, Oracle CX Service, and Oral CX Sales.

 

Additionally, Oracle launched integrations with Sprinklr’s customer experience management application for Eloqua and its B2B Service.

 

BlueJeans by Verizon this week announced a series of capabilities for healthcare providers. The BlueJeans and Epic integration, which is available in the Epic App Orchard, allows healthcare providers to launch video meetings directly from their MyChart of MyChart Mobile app, BlueJeans by Verizon said. Additionally, BlueJeans by Verizon said it has implemented a HIPAA program and will be signing HIPAA business associate agreements to better serve healthcare privacy and security concerns.

 

In a blog post, speech recognition company Deepgram this week announced an integration for UniMRCP, an open-source cross-platform that implements the Media Resource Control Protocol client and server commonly used for building custom IVR dialogue workflows. Via the UniMRCP integration, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, and Nuance will be able to use Deepgram’s speech recognition technology as a means of identifying why customers are calling, and direct them accordingly, Deepgram said.

 

Cloud contact center provider Talkdesk this week launched two products —Talkdesk Remote and Talkdesk On The Go — aimed at increasing efficiency for organizations with WFH agents and supervisors, Talkdesk said. Talkdesk Remote provides secure remote access to workforce management tools and other resources for managers, while allowing agents to connect with customers from anywhere. Features include two-way background noise reduction to eliminate distractions. For the mobile workforce, such as outside sales and field-location teams, Talkdesk On The Go provides contact center capabilities from smartphones, tablets, and watches. On The Go, which auto-syncs with the desktop app, includes a native CRM integration and hands-free capabilities, the company added.

 

Both offerings are generally available.

 

Gartner last week released its 2020 “Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure” report, which ranked SD-WAN, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and SD-Branch providers in one of four categories. These categories and vendors (in alphabetical order) include:

In addition to the ranking, Gartner made several predictions to where the WAN edge market is heading. For example, Gartner predicts 60% of organizations will have implemented SD-WAN by 2024, with more than 60% of them opting for a SASE architecture. Additionally, Gartner predicts that enterprises will increasingly leverage AI to manage WAN issues, stating that 20% of configuration and troubleshooting issues will be done via AI assistants by 2024.