Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Image credit: "A is for Automation," by Thomas Brechler

New leadership team, new energy. That’s what the analysts who attended the Cisco Collaboration Analyst Summit got to experience. Led by the effervescent Amy Chang, Cisco’s collaboration team is enthusiastic, passionate, and energetic, ready to take on old and new competitors in the collaboration space. The team is focused on growth and celebrated 24% year-over-year growth with champagne and cupcakes for the analysts (I’d also like to give a shout out to Chuck Robbins who took time out of his busy earnings announcement day to meet with the analysts and answer questions).

Sometimes analysts have a really tough job, yet some how we manage to persevere. Recently Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE) celebrated its 100^th anniversary and held its analyst conference in the principality of Monaco, home to the Monte Carlo casino, the royal palace, and lots of really, really expensive cars. Among the glitz and glamor, ALE presented its strategy and roadmap to around 40 communications and networking analysts, while providing us with an update about their successes to date.

The company’s key focus areas are around several areas:

Last week, I attended my first Alcatel event in far-away, uber-luxe Monaco. The analyst event was actually a coda to a week-long sales event which we didn’t attend, with the overall flocus being a celebration of the company’s centenary.

Image: Metamorphosis by Escher

Let’s continue our tour of the 2018 market transitions. After covering business communications in part one, I want to discuss customer service.

On the heels of a large $100 million B-round, Talkdesk held its third customer and partner conference, OpenTalk. In seven years, the company established a name for itself in the contact center market. Let’s explore this new entrant in the customer interaction management space.

The Opus Conversational Commerce Conference took place mid-September in San Francisco. It is the fifth edition of the event previously called the Intelligent Assistance Conference. It has become a lighthouse event, gathering industry experts, vendors and enterprise early adopters of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI). It provides the perfect opportunity for discussing some market trends. 

Referring to Salesforce Service Cloud as a new entrant in the customer interaction management space is almost an oxymoron. With a run rate of over $3 Billion, it looks more like a gorilla. Yet, Service Cloud is mostly known for case management. I spoke with Bill Patterson, who became its General Manager last summer. He agrees that the market is not well aware of its interaction management capabilities. Let’s explore what it has to offer.