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It was a challenging week for analysts and consultants, with Nextiva's event overlapping with BroadSoft Connections, just down the road apiece in San Antonio. No complaints about being in Scottsdale, and while most UC&C watchers know BSFT, Nextiva isn't well known in our circles, and I'm happy to be one of the UC Experts in attendance to help tell that story. It's a story worth telling, but also serves as a model for many, many other players still in the voice business who want - and need - to evolve to something akin to UC&C.

The week before last I got to spend a couple of days with the Mitel management team and a small selected group of analysts and consultants. The sessions showed the ongoing progress of the Mitel team and their products. The following are few highlights I came away with from the event.

QoS - Quality of Service (analytics) and QoE - Quality of Experience (user satisfaction) are tightly intertwined in an ever challenging and complex environment of networks, devices, mobile and applications. Bandwidth is often considered the cause for jitter, round trip delays, echo, crosstalk and noisy calls. As a technical professional and integrator, you are faced with planning in advance what the problems will be and providing instant solutions when the C-level calls to complain.

Company's Network Assessment Solution, Perspective, takes top honors in the 2016 Networking-Voice/Data/UC category

RingCentral, Inc. has announced that the company reached a new milestone. The RingCentral Connect Platform now receives 1.6 million API requests per day, marking an annual increase in overall requests of about 300 percent, and the company can now claim over 350 custom application integrations.

BroadSoft, Inc. has introduced a new portfolio of cloud PBX, contact center, and unified communications and collaboration applications. This new portfolio, called BroadSoft Business, integrates core business applications and communications in a single cloud platform, and can scale to all market segments.

There are three core applications within BroadSoft Business: UC-One, Team-One, and CC-One. BroadSoft Hub, an enterprise-grade cloud service integrated with the apps, provides contextual intelligence for the entire platform.

IBM WOW-World of Watson hit like a hurricane with exciting new products, partner solutions and a new view of the way we about "think" everything. Thomas J. Watson, along with his father, built IBM into the powerhouse and the legacy lives in their namesake of IBM Watson.

Zendesk has undergone a series of changes, and has emerged as a rebranded version of itself. While the company's focus will remain on customer service, it's expanding to help companies create better customer relationships beyond single interactions, which will be the first and foremost priority.