Infrastructure

There was a lot of buzz and new announcements at Zoomtopia 2022, held in San Jose, CA last week. As CEO Eric Yuan exclaimed during this keynote, “What’s next for Zoom? So freaking much! We have launched over 1,500 features and enhancements this year.”

The big announcements included the introduction of Zoom email and calendar, as well as Spots (which I’m still trying to better understand). My main coverage areas are contact center and unified communications, so I focused on Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center during the event.

Channel partners have always played a very large role in Avaya’s go-to-market efforts, and have been key to the company’s growth, helping to support Avaya’s large installed customer base. With a new CEO and relatively new North America Channel Chief, Avaya has been on a mission to listen to and engage with its channel partners to better understand their views and concerns.

In this video interview, BCStrategies’ Blair Pleasant speaks with Karthik Arumugam, SVP of the RingCentral-Mitel partnership to discuss the partnership, the migration process, and more.

The Zoom Perspectives Analyst Conference in San Jose, CA demonstrated how to run a hybrid event. With hosts, presenters, and analyst attendees both in the physical and remote locations, Zoom showed off its events platform and set the bar for hybrid events going forward. Josh Brage, Global Services Manager, was the Remote Host and MC, and there was even a remote house band located in Austin, TX to perform between speakers. Remote attendees were able to participate in the live chat and Q&A and were equal participants during the sessions, as shown below.

BCStrategies’ Blair Pleasant spoke with Daren Finney, Senior Vice President, Global Channels for Mitel about the company’s initiative around Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM). In this interview, Finney discusses why CLM is so important to Mitel, how it helps both partners and customers, and what partners can do to be successful.