As one of the biggest events on the unified communications and collaboration calendar Enterprise Connect never fails to catch the imagination. The 2019 conference concluded this week, so we take stock to review the biggest news stories, check who took the awards and analyse the emerging trends.
What's New?
Well, as always there was quite a bit of event related news and announcements. Let's take a look at some of the biggest stories.
There is only one place to start really and that was at the Poly booth. Poly was unveiled as the new identity of the combined Plantronics Polycom businesses on Monday and the news stole the show. The unveiling process was not understated, as one of the largest booths in the expo hall, engulfed in the new Poly branding, was unmasked once some large digital signage reached the conclusion of it's countdown. Canvassing opinion of those in attendance yielded generally positive analysis, general consensus was that it was a bold move to leave the old brands behind and by the end of the week Poly seemed to be part of the furniture.
LogMeIn also joined in with the branding news by launching GoTo and GoToConnect as part of their new UCC brand. There had been some query, within the industry, as to what their plans were for Jive, since acquiring the business last year, but now that all seems clear. GoTo will be their new Unified Communications & Collaboration suite of solutions, including Jive. Alongside their flagship meeting and webinar solutions, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, the new product portfolio will feature the company’s first ever, truly integrated UCC solution, GoToConnect, as well as their new out of the box conference room solution, GoToRoom.
Collaboration innovation was high on the agenda. The three market leaders; Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams and Slack were front and centre at this year's show and all three bought a host of updates. Microsoft announced eight new features for Teams included custom backgrounds, private channels and, the warmly received, whiteboard meeting optimisation feature. Cisco's focus was on the cognitive, bringing additional context to their meeting solutions with artificial intelligence tech offering facial recognition, framing and additional meeting simplicity features with Webex Assistant, there was also the promise of much more to come. Slack launched Enterprise Key Management, an additional security feature where customers manage and apply message encryption keys, so all of the key players bought something to the table.
There were also some hot new industry partnerships announced. Zoom upped their UC game by allowing integration between Zoom Phone, their cloud PBX, and contact centre products from Five9 and Twilio. Three of the most rapidly growing tech businesses around, the partnerships might prove seriously disruptive.
We also saw various vendors announce closer links with Google. The behemoth of the tech world is offering vendors the chance to leverage its artificial intelligence engines to enhance their own offerings. Both 8x8 and Avaya announced that they are strengthening ties and deepening integration, with Google, to that end. With AI in mind Talkdesk launched their own Workforce Management platform which they promise, with the help of their Talkdesk iQ AI enhancements, will outperform the existing market players with its microservices modern cloud native architecture. We also saw, first hand, Masergy's new AI-driven Intelligent Virtual Agent which unites its UCaaS and CCaaS solutions with chatbot and smart queuing functionality.
2019's EC also bought a host of other announcements. BlueJeans, with their partner Dolby, will be launching the first cloud service to connect desktops, mobile devices, and room systems in one video meeting, BlueJeans Rooms-as-a-Service, featuring Dolby Voice Room. Poly also didn’t stop with the branding as they announced a host of new products and probably most interestingly the first set of IP phones certified for Google Voice, the VVX 250, 350 and 450 OBi Edition, a sign of things to come? Konftel gave us sneak preview of their new K800 conference phone that will be launching later this year, the device offers daisy chain capabilities and some impressive audio stats.
Who took the awards?
The organisers of this year's show compiled an esteemed panel of industry analysts and experts to crown winners in various categories across the event's focus areas.
