On Thursday evening we named the winners of the UC Awards 2026 live on LinkedIn, after months of entries, scoring and judges' debates. Nine years in, the shortlist looks very different from the one the programme started with. The categories now run from the core communications platform out to meeting rooms, AI, security and the organisations deploying the technology, and the winners reflect how far the market has spread.
In this week's roundup I look at what this year's winners tell us about where UC is heading, from the platform awards and Cisco's run in the meeting room to the AI and Trust categories. I've also picked out Microsoft's new phishing detection in Teams and new research from Jabra and Intermedia on what makes AI stick.
Editor's Pick: Enreach Takes Best UC Platform at the UC Awards 2026
The headline award went to Enreach, which won Best UC Platform for Enreach Contact. RingCentral won Best Integrated UC Solution, and Zoom won Best AI-Powered Collaboration Experience for Zoom Workplace. Every entry was scored by a panel of enterprise leaders and industry analysts on four weighted criteria: innovation depth, demonstrable impact, market differentiation and future relevance.
As Chair of Judges, I said in our winners announcement that the panel tested every claim in front of it:
Every one of these winners earned their place on the evidence.
The platform awards don't simply follow market share. A year after Zoom won Best UC Platform, Enreach, a European provider, came out on top in the flagship category. The full list of winners and highly commended organisations is on the UC Awards website.
Cisco Wins Three UC Awards as RoomOS 27 Arrives
Cisco was the most decorated vendor of the night, winning Best AV Platform, Management and Analytics for Collaboration Control Hub, Best Device and Hardware Innovation for Room Kit Pro G2, and Best Meeting Room Experience Solution for its RoomOS Director Agent. The other meeting room award, Best AV Integration and Deployment Project, went to Symetrix for its Cognio deployment at Monash University.
The wins land in the same month as RoomOS 27, which lets Cisco devices run Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet from one centrally managed fleet. As my WebexOne 2026 wrap-up set out, Espen Løberg, VP and GM of Collaboration Devices at Cisco, sees platform choice as the first thing to settle:
When it comes to our ambition of being the operating system for the agentic workplace, the meeting service cannot be a barrier to adoption.
For IT teams running mixed estates, the room is now where AI and interoperability meet, and the judges rewarded the vendors making that easier to manage.
Teams Partners and Trust Winners as Microsoft Turns AI on Phishing
The Microsoft Teams ecosystem was well represented. Algo Communication Products won Best Microsoft Teams Solution, and AudioCodes won Best Connectivity and Infrastructure Solution for Operator Connect for Resellers. In the Trust track, Pexip won Best Secure Communications Solution for Pexip Secure Meetings and Smarsh won Best Compliance and Governance Innovation.
Security in Teams was in the news too. Microsoft has started rolling out AI-powered phishing detection for chats from external contacts getting in touch for the first time, aimed at the fake IT help desk scams that Arctic Wolf Labs has linked to more than 400 incidents. Shubham Dubey of Arctic Wolf Labs says most organisations leave far more open than they need to:
Most organizations have no legitimate need for open, any-tenant external chat.
Worldwide availability follows in early to mid-December, and the detection works best behind an allow-list of the partner domains an organisation actually works with.
