UCaaS Tidbits #2440

SkySwitch has launched contact center-as-a-service (CCaSS) for its white-label resellers. [channel vision mag]

RingCentral Enterprise with Google for Work is a new partnership. It will chase (far) behind the Microsoft suite. As expressed here, “Take Skype for Business, Cortana, and Yammer to name just three, held together by Office 365 and the Azure cloud platform, while not forgetting the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), as well as the recent acquisition of LinkedIn.” RC has had partnerships with AT&T, BT, Telus and others. These partnerships have not moved the needle. This one likely won’t either.

A survey from BetterCloud finds a trend developing: ‘Office 365-based organisations are more than four times larger and five years older on average, while companies who run Office 365 have IT teams five times the size of their Google counterparts.” Looks to me that if you have a big IT department, you have a likelihood of more Microsoft certified staff (and Cisco certs as well). The one thing Google needs is a certification program. No better salesperson than someone that invested time and money on a certification.

magicJack is rolling out its magicJack for business to the SMB market. No idea why they claim so much success with the magicJack device, since that clearly was a fad – and what does that have to do with the SMB market? magicJack acquired Broadsmart for $42M. Why would it want to associate Broadsoft UCaaS with that device?

Finally the VoIP hardware vendors are stepping it up.

“Edgewater Networks’ hybrid cloud to edge, end-to-end approach to security, service management and analytics is an ideal complement to net2phone’s white glove business communications delivery platform.” [pr] So net2phone is deploying the Edgewater IAD and management suite. The next evolution for Edgewater is SD-WAN, an orchestration layer that will overlay last mile to provide packet shaping, failover, analytics and more. Vonage Business and a few former CLECs (like ELNK and TPAC) have added SD-WAN as a managed service.

CenturyLink chose Versa as its SDN partner. Versa has been the “lead virtualization partner for the SD-WAN and SD-Security services launched last week.”

CenturyLink beefed up its SDN and NFV strategy by buying the assets of Active Broadband Networks. “CenturyLink says it purchased ABN’s edge platform assets, designed to enable service providers to deliver cloud-based services. The company said its purchase would help automate its network, move network functions into the cloud, and deliver SDN and NFV services.”

Lastly, hardware vendor, PATTON, has launched a new VoIP CPE that integrate FXS, BRI with UCC and All-IP Communications. The SmartNode VoIP Gateways and eSBCs are designed for small offices that need legacy-device integration with All-IP business communications and UC&C.

Avant Joins Telarus, TBI as RingCentral Master Agents. I find it interesting how so many VoIP providers follow the same channel go to market strategy of chasing the master agencies, who already have 20+ vendors in that space. VoIP shouldn’t be a commodity, but I guess that is just what it will be relegated to be.

Tags: call center, centurylink, CPE, hardware, master agency, microsoft, NFV, SDN, UC, unified messaging, voip, WAN
Related tags: business communications, business, magicjack, cloud, service, google