New Year, New Newsletter and Podcast - January Editions Out Now

Happy 2023, all! As busy as 2022 was, this year is already looking like more of the same. Lots to write about and lots to talk about, and the latest from my end can be found in the current editions of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review and my Watch This Space podcast.

If you’re not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here.

Also, if you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives now for both the newsletter and the podcast, so it’s easy to find earlier editions of each there. The current edition of WTS marks Season 6 of our podcast, so there’s a lot on offer in the archive if you want to check out earlier episodes.

December Writing Roundup

With 2022 coming to a close, I just have one public writing piece for December, and it starts an exploration of a new topic for me - more to come in future writeups.

Telemarketing Fraud Presents an Unacceptable Risk to Businesses, No Jitter, Dec. 20

Telemarketing Fraud and Risks to Businesses - My Latest on No Jitter

This week was my turn to contribute an article to No Jitter from the BC Strategies team, and it’s a big topic - telemarketing fraud. As consumers, we all know what that looks like, but since we’d rather not think about it, the rest of the story tends to live in dark corners where there’s a constant struggle to stamp out or mitigate the damage done by bad actors.

There are a lot of moving parts here, and many have a direct impact on the telecom ecosystem. I’ve been researching this space recently, and the challenges are more daunting than you might think. This is my first analysis of telemarketing fraud, and there’s lot more to explore, and I hope you give this a read here on No Jitter.

Big CX News, Episode 3 - AWS, RingCentral, and Salesforce

Last week, I was a guest analyst on UK-based Big CX News, hosted by Charlie Mitchell. He had a full panel of thought leaders, and it was fun sharing all of our perspectives on some recent big news items. Hope to do it again soon, and hope you check it out - here’s the link.

My Latest Insight Report - for Upstream Works Software

Longer-form writing takes, well, longer to do, longer to be reviewed, and longer to be published. I do a lot of writing for all lengths, and here’s a current example of what I call an Insight Report. This would be longer than an article, shorter than a white paper, but substantive enough to be gated content.

I’ve been working with Upstream Works Software for a few years now, and when the stars line up, we do a couple of these annually. The latest one has been posted to their website, and here’s the registration page to get it.

The title is pretty self-explanatory, and speaks to a key trend driving just about everything in the contact center space these days: The AI Opportunity - Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations. I hope you like it, and if any questions, just drop me a line.

My Next SCTC Fireside Chat - Dec. 14: "I've Been Everywhere, Man!"

We all know how that song goes, and it’s the theme song for this week’s SCTC Fireside Chat. I’ll be in conversation with the host, Steve Leaden - and fellow SIPtoner - where I’ll share highlights from my recent run of travel to various industry events. This should be fun, and after the chat, you should check out the SCTC for yourself.

Here’s the 5 second trailer on Youtube, and details are here to sign up. Our Fireside Chats are from 12-1 ET most Wednesdays, and hope you can join us then!

Newsletter Time - Podcast Too - December Editions Out Now

The December issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with the latest Watch This Space podcast. As the thumb below shows, Chris and I did a roundup of the November events I attended, along with our 2022 takeaways. Hope you like it!

If you’re not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here.

If you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives for both the newsletter and the podcast. The refresh for the podcast archive is almost complete, so it’s very easy to find and listen to earlier episodes there. For the newsletter archive, the updates are mostly done, but haven’t gone live yet - coming soon!

November Writing Roundup

Another busy month with travel to events, but three public things I’d been working on were published last month, so here they are if you haven’t seen them yet.

AI for the Contact Center - It’s So Much More than Chatbots, NICE, Nov. 30

Vendors Use AI to Boost Customer Experience in the Contact Center, No Jitter, Nov. 15

The AI Opportunity: Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations, Upstream Works, Nov. 4

New White Paper - AI for the Contact Center, with NICE

With the sub-title being “It’s so much more than chatbots”, you should get the gist pretty quickly. AI has become a must-have for contact centers, and while chatbots are often the entry point for getting on this path, the use cases are much richer.

My analysis examines the drivers for embracing AI, but also for taking a practical approach that gets beyond the hype. The white paper has been featured now on NICE’s website, and here’s the registration page to download a copy.

New Podcast - with Intermedia, Talking About Cloud Migration

UK-based EM360 enlists me to host podcasts with their sponsors from time to time, and for this episode, I was in conversation with Mark Sher from Intermedia. There’s a lot of ground to cover with cloud migration, and in the case of UCaaS - as well as CCaaS - the challenge is educating the end buyer about the rationale.

This is very much a you-can’t-get-there-from-here story, and for anyone still on the fence about cloud for business communications, you’ll want to check our podcast out. I’ve long had a nice rapport with Mark, and I hope you’ll enjoy the discussion. Here’s the link, and if you like what’s on tap, I’m sure Mark and his team would love to tell you more.

Next Webinar - with Five9, Canadian Contact Center Market Trends

On Thursday, Dec. 1, Five9 is running the 2022 edition of their CX Summit Canada, and I’ve been brought back again to provide an overview of the contact center market. I’m part of a larger program running through the day - all of it virtual - and later, I’ll be joining an in-person reception in downtown Toronto. The Five9 folks will determine who can attend, and to find out more, here’s the registration link.

New Podcast - with NICE, on Digital Agent Experience

New things come up for me pretty regularly, and this time around, I was a guest on CX Pulse, which NICE’s regular podcast. Hosted by Amelia Earhart, we covered some ground around the need to take a digital approach to improving the agent experience. With so much focus on customer experience, it’s easy to overlook the needs of agents, and how important that is for providing great customer experience.

This is my first time being on Amelia’s podcast, and I hope you like it - here’s link to give it a listen.

Mavenir Analyst Event - Quick Take and Pix

Trust the Future - that’s Mavenir’s current tag line, and I really like it. This isn’t just any future they’re talking about - it’s mainly about 5G, but also Open RAN. 5G has yet to live up to the hype, especially in North America, but both carriers and wireless vendors seem all-in, including Mavenir.

While most see the future of wireless networks being 5G, Open RAN is an open question. Mavenir looks to be out in front with cloud-native Open RAN, and while the rationale is clear to them - and now to me - their competitors seem to like things the way they are, and mobile operators don’t seem ready for it - yet. Mavenir believes it’s just a matter of time, and if they’re right, they could own this space.

The mobile infrastructure space isn’t a core focus for me, but it’s adjacent to a lot of what I follow, and when thinking of VoIP, and possibly UCaaS and CCaaS, I’ve seen this movie before. Mavenir is a pretty healthy company, and a bit of an anomaly compared to the giants who dominate this market - namely Ericsson and Nokia.

This actually puts them in a great position to push the envelope and be disruptive, and that’s exactly the persona they’re projecting. Sure rings familiar to me, at least with the early days of VoIP, when the first wave of startups brought disruption, and posed a real threat to a well-entrenched status quo - that for the most part have come around to VoIP.

Given Mavenir’s global customer base, they have found plenty of mobile operators willing to adopt more open, more flexible and less costly infrastructure. Without naming names, they have 19 Open RAN deployments across 17 countries, and 4 trials going with Tier 1 carriers, one of which gave a full presentation as to what they’re doing with Open RAN.

Carriers have taken on a lot of debt to finance their 5G buildouts, and to counter that, they need innovation and new services to monetize these networks. Mavenir isn’t in the business of building applications, but with Open RAN - along with the rest of their extensive wireless network portfolio - they provide carriers with a nextgen platform to support programmability so they can develop their own apps instead of relying on third parties.

Just as important, BSS is another key piece of their cloud-based portfolio, as legacy BSS cannot really support these new services, and without a proper billing platform, carriers won’t be able to monetize these new 5G networks. Speaking of 5G, Mavenir did a great job outlining all kinds of use cases, and they have a pretty good handle on what carriers are missing to be successful with 5G.

I tend to view things through the lens of communications and collaboration technologies, and there wasn’t much talk about UCaaS or CCaaS. Instead, the use cases were framed around Industry 4.0 and Enterprise 2.0. These terms may sound generic, but Mavenir provided pretty good use cases and monetization scenarios for each. I’d need a separate post to illustrate all this, but in short, these use cases are in line with my Future of Work research, and I think they’re on the right track here, for sure.

That’s my high-level take for now, and to close out, here are some of my photos.

CEO/Pres. Pardeep Kohli, EVP Stefan Canteralli, Q&A session

Test equipment, anechoic chamber (very cool), OpenBeam radio demo

Event was held at the HALL Arts Hotel, in the center of Dallas’s arts district - my kinda place - high end for sure, but very artsy vibe, and after the sessions - when in Texas, you gotta look the part (hat tip, Carlos Aragon, no pun intended!)…

Vendor Roundup for AI Usage in the Contact Center - My Latest on No Jitter

I’m part of the UC Expert Team with BCStrategies, and we take turns contributing our perspectives to No Jitter. It’s my turn this week, and with all the industry events I’ve been attending lately, there’s plenty to talk about. There are many stories to tell for how AI is being used in the contact center - some is transformative, and some is more incremental, but overall, it’s a dominant trend now.

I can only cover so much ground in one article, and over the course my recent work with vendors, I’ve provided a brief update on what four vendors are doing - Cisco, NICE, Twilio and Dialpad. Each really warrants its own article, and the same can be said for other vendors I’m following just as closely. My writeup is running now on No Jitter, and as always, comments and sharing are both welcome. If this piques your interest in a longer analysis, I’m not hard to find!

Next Stop - Dallas and Mavenir

Got one more stop on my run of travel to industry events - to Dallas, for Mavenir’s analyst event. Since early October, pretty much every week up til now, I’ve been going somewhere to one, sometimes two events. Every one has been worthwhile, so while it feels like a grind, that’s how the business goes, and if anything, I’m well-informed about the state of things in my world.

While Mavenir isn’t core to my everyday coverage, their focus is very relevant in terms of how wireless connectivity is becoming a factor for enterprises, and how it creates new opportunities for carriers to offer cloud services like UCaaS and CCaaS. This is the reason why Ericsson bought Vonage, and Mavenir has already been on this path for a while, so I’m keen to get the updates, and will share what I can while there.

Zoomtopia - Quick Pix and Post

Just have time for a quick post before flying home from Zoomtopia in San Jose. This is the first in-person Zoom analyst event since 2019, and it was a great update on all that’s happening with them - and it’s a lot. I’ll have more to say about that in upcoming posts, so for now, am just going to share some photos.

Below - CEO Eric Yuan, in good form as always. Right - Alex Borstein, who was the event host - yes, the voice of Lois Griffin! - and kept the vibe on edge all the way through.

Eric talking about their initiatives for giving back, and later in conversation with Timbaland. Yes, he’s a fan of Zoom, but was good hear about how he overcame rejection early on, and just persevered. Eric followed a similar journey, when he couldn’t get funding for Zoom early on.

Aisera - one of many partners I spoke with while walking the show floor, then later, the analysts went offsite to Zoom HQ for briefings and demos from their product managers.

A few of the demos - Zoom whiteboard, digital signage and reservations. Yes, video and screens are everywhere here, and it provides the kind of flexibility needed for today’s hybrid work. Lots of talk about inclusion to make remote workers feel part of the team, and keep everyone engaged from wherever they’re located. Digital signage - this photo is a particularly good example of a mass notification, such as if there’s an E911 incident in the office.

Next Stop - San Jose and Zoomtopia

My analyst travel-palooza continues, with my fourth trip to the Bay area of California in less than a month. Never crossed the country this many times in so short a period as now, but that’s how the fall travel season is rolling in 2022 for analyst events.

Next stop is Zoomtopia, and it’s my first in-person Zoom event since the pandemic started. That would have been October 2019 - I wasn’t there for the whole thing, but it was memorable - especially the music. This time around, though, I’ll catch it all. Follow me here or on social for updates - @arnoldjon for Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

New Strategic Insights Report - with Upstream Works

Upstream Works is an innovative Canadian contact center vendor, and I’ve been doing various things with them for a few years now. One of these includes writing Strategic Insight reports - not quite as long as a white paper, but substantive enough to require registration for downloading.

My most recent Strategic Insight report for them has been published now, titled The AI Opportunity: Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations. If that’s top of mind for you, and would like to read about it, here’s the link.

Newsletter Time - November Edition, Same for Watch This Space Podcast

I usually publish these on the first Tuesday of the month, but with all the travel happening now, things had to slide for one day, but they’re running now. The timing is also impacted by how the calendar falls, and for November, the first Tuesday happens to be on the 1st, and I usually don’t have everything ready on the 1st of the month. I don’t have any sponsors, so nobody is cancelling contracts on me, and subscribers haven’t bailed, and best I can tell, the world is still turning.

So, the November issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with the latest Watch This Space podcast. As the thumb below shows, Chris and I did a roundup of the various industry events running the past few weeks. I could easily do an episode on each event, so we only touched on a few high points.

If you’re not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here.

If you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives for both the newsletter and the podcast. The refresh for the podcast archive is almost complete, so it’s very easy to find and listen to earlier episodes there. For the newsletter archive, the updates are mostly done, but haven’t gone live yet - coming soon!

Cisco WebexOne Analyst Open House - Quick Take and Photos

With all the event travel the past few weeks, it’s been a real challenge keeping on top of my regular work. Cisco had an analyst-only event recently as a preview for their WebexOne virtual event. The updates were under NDA until that event, so that’s another reason why I haven’t posted about it here.

At this point, none of this will be news to anyone following Cisco Webex, so my comments will be short. I’ll expand on this, though, in some upcoming posts, but time is also very short right now, so I need to get this posted before boarding my flight.

In short, Cisco looks to have the most complete portfolio to fully support hybrid work and contact center - not just for their platforms, but for the devices, the hardware and all the networking technology that makes all of this go. It’s a pretty impressive range of capabilities, but that also poses some challenges in terms of selling all of this, as there are different economic buyers for these pieces.

Also very interesting is their approach to competing against the rest of this very crowded market, especially Microsoft. Just as Teams can run inside Webex, Webex can now run inside Teams, giving customers totally flexibility for using both, and that reflects the reality of this now being a multi-platform market.

Other highlights included a new feature - audio watermarking - and they’re taking a leadership role in helping enterprises re-imaging their workspaces - quite a few new pieces around that, actually. Also, lots of AI updates, including applications that help workers manage their “focus time” to stay productive. I got a great hologram demo as well, and it’s really not that hard to envision workplace use cases coming to life as adoption gains traction. Finally, I should add that their contact center story is stronger than you might think, as are their CPaaS capabilities - Webex Connect. That’s all for now, but I’m not done with this update.

Webex execs, Jeetu Patel, Javed Kahn and Lorrissa Horton