Blog archives
Slack and Zoom: Bottoms Up!
Slack and Zoom are achieving success as viral apps with passionate users; IT leaders take note! This month, on opposite coasts, has seen separate user and partner conferences for two of the rising stars in enterprise collaboration -- Slack and Zoom -- each with similar market views, growth trajectories, and customer loyalty stories. Read the [...]
Mitel Straddles the Line With Cloud, On-Prem
I attended the Mitel Next conference in Phoenix last week. Though no big announcements came out of the conference, there were some key takeways. Mitel executives conveyed the message to customers and partners that they’re not abandoning on-premises Unified Communications (UC) or contact center customers. Unlike some competitors, Mitel will continue to support—and more importantly, [...]
Slack Frontiers NYC 2018: Highlight and Takeaways
Last week my colleague Irwin Lazar and I attended the Slack Frontiers conference in NYC. We both walked away impressed. Sure, we've been Slack fans since Nemertes moved on to the platform in 2016. And Irwin consistently hears good things about the platform in his research into Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC). In our most recent [...]
Microsoft Matures Teams Strategy at Ignite
Whereas 2017's Microsoft Ignite conference was disruptive, this year's event focused on execution. Another Microsoft Ignite conference is in the books, held late last month. This year's communications and collaboration announcements were much more evolutional than in 2017, when the company announced that it was making its Teams app the core of its real-time collaboration [...]
5 Steps Toward Increasing Customer Success Scores
Customer ratings are the top metric companies use to track for success or failure in their efforts to improve customer experience, according to Nemertes' 2018-2019 Digital Customer Experience (DCX) research study of nearly 700 global companies. There is no shortage in the types of customer success ratings companies use. But when we asked study respondents [...]
Super Micro Spy Chip Hack: How Real?
The Supermicro chip Source: Bloomberg Should you be worried about the Chinese Supermicro spy chip revelations? In a nutshell, yes. If you're among the organizations using Supermicro server boards: Run, do not walk, to your server rooms and examine the boards in minute detail. And regardless of what server hardware you use, it's [...]
DevOps is Coming To Enterprise Architecture!
DevOps is Coming! In character as Paul Revere. Photo by WSTA Last month I presented the keynote at an afternoon seminar on Enterprise Architecture held by the Wall St. Technology Association (WSTA). I also moderated a panel session on the topic. Other presenters and panelists included folks from AT&T, JP Morgan, Xebia Labs, Myriad [...]
SD-WAN, Next-Gen Branches, DevOps and More: AT&T Summit 2018
Not just a box: Firewall, router, SD-WAN, and WAN optimizer! AT&T's Universal CPE It’s always fun seeing something you’ve helped with reach fruition. So I was thrilled yesterday at the AT&T Summit to finally see the universal CPE (uCPE) device. AT&T has made the uCPE a centerpiece of its Flexware in-net SD-WAN solution. [...]
Home Field Advantage: SD-WAN and MPLS
I've been mulling over things I learned at the recent CenturyLink analyst day. I keep coming back to their pledge to not lose focus on the fact that they own a transport network, and to make sure that fact can provide differentiation when considering new products. I keep coming back to this mostly in the [...]
Agent Turnover Improves With DCX Initiatives
An age-old problem in contact centers is high turnover rates among agents. But contact-center leaders are starting to see improvements through various digital customer experience initiatives. Overall, organizations reduced their annual turnover rate from 24.2% to 16.8%, following their digital transformation initiative. The success was even more pronounced with large organizations with more than 2,500 [...]