New Services Roundup: 8x8, RingCentral, Vonage, More
It was a big month for unified communications.
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RingCentral
RingCentral launched new integrated collaborative meeting and contact-center services.
RingCentral Meetings includes integrated team messaging, online meetings, video conferencing, screen-sharing and task management, allowing for a full meeting experience. The services include HD video conferencing, screen sharing, team messaging, file sharing and task management.
Edward Gately has the write-up.
8x8
8×8 has a new communications platform that combines call, collaboration, conferencing and contact-center offerings.
The company says the X Series helps businesses “win in the new battlefield where customer experience is everything.” The platform has customers and employees interact through a single system of engagement.
Read our story about 8x8's new product.
Vonage
Vonage rolled out its new cloud-native platform aimed at midmarket business needs.
Vonage Business Cloud integrates with tools for messaging, increased mobility, network optimization and video collaboration, and was specifically designed and developed around a public cloud-based architecture, allowing for faster innovation and accelerating global expansion, the company said. It replaces the Vonage Essentials product.
Vonage's chief channel officer told us that this offering gives smaller businesses access to enterprise-like features.
CenturyLink
CenturyLink broadened its hosted unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services to include the Cisco Spark cloud-based collaboration suite.
It also has obtained the Cisco Powered Cisco Spark Service Provider (SP) designation, confirming its ability to support the complete portfolio of Cisco Spark solutions. CenturyLink provides Cisco Spark Meet, Spark Message and Spark Call (hosted and on-premises) offerings.
Read all about CenturyLink's UC&C updates.
Broadvoice
Broadvoice launched a new UCaaS and virtual contact-center platform.
Broadvoice b-hive brings together cloud PBX, UC and collaboration features with virtual contact center in one platform that’s connected to the company’s network and hosting infrastructure. It’s backed by Broadvoice’s customer-success organization. Partners can now offer their SMB clients voice-based call center functionality.
Learn more about the new Broadvoice offering.
MicroCorp
MicroCorp, the master agent, has a new partner portal that oversees “a channel partner’s entire back office.”
“Nautilus 2.0” changes enhance the portal’s dashboard and add new reports and analytics. The portal assists with multi-site, multi-vendor, and multi-product deals. The order confirmation process has been updated, and the portal has added a daily order summary report and “automated firm order commitment notifications.”
See what MicroCorp's president had to say about the enhancement.
McAfee
Cybersecurity vendor McAfee extended its cloud security platform to protect Microsoft Azure environments.
The company unveiled its latest enterprise offering, the first since it completed its acquisition of SkyHigh Networks, a provider of cloud access security broker (CASB) software. Skyhigh now is part of McAfee’s cloud security business unit. McAfee’s cloud security portfolio now includes Skyhigh Security Cloud, Virtual Network Security Platform (McAfee vNSP) and Cloud Workload Security (McAfee CWS).
Get details on the platform.
Samsung
Samsung Electronics America and MobileHelp Healthcare launched a new remote patient monitoring (RPM) offering with integrated emergency-response capabilities.
Built on the Samsung Tab A and supported by Samsung Knox defense-grade security, MobileHelp Touch blends the safety of a traditional emergency response system with the added personal and professional health-care benefits of RPM technology and video conferencing. MobileHelp Touch gives health-care providers the ability to provide patients with traditional RPM for their entire episode of care.
The organizations made the announcement at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) Health IT Conference.
Edward Gately has the conference recap.
SolarWinds
The IT management software provider released a pair of updates to arm IT professionals with the broad system-management capabilities needed for hybrid environments.
The new version of Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) extends support to to solutions from HPE, Dell EMC, Infinidat and IBM, while the update to Server & Application Monitor (SAM) provides application-dependency functionality that enables customers to automatically discover network-based relationships, between applications and servers, by correlating communications at the application process level.
Kris Blackmon has the scoop.
Telesystem
Telesystem launched a software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) offering last month.
Telesystem billed the solution as fitting into the company’s overall security portfolio. Telesystem partnered with Versa Networks in September and ran a beta trial for the technology.
Hear from Telesystem on why it took an extended time to release an SD-WAN product.
Pivot3
Pivot3, the hyperconverged infrastructure vendor, moved its Pivot3 Cloud Edition to the public cloud, beginning with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pivot3 customers had been using its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for private clouds. This latest move will enable customers to simplify, optimize and automate the use of multicloud environments to better address business challenges, the vendor said. Pivot3 Cloud Edition runs in AWS as an Amazon Machine Image and orchestrates replication of data from on-premises Pivot3 HCI to AWS.
Get details on the changes.
Ribbon
Ribbon Communications launched a suite of UC security and intelligent operations applications for its Ribbon Protect platform, which provides a single view of the end-to end-network.
By establishing a baseline of voice, video sessions and IP port activity, the platform and its applications “quickly identify and mitigate deviations from this baseline, whether telephony denial of service (T-DoS) attacks, quality-of-experience issues, toll fraud or potential data exfiltration,” the company said.
Hear more from Ribbon.
CloudJumper
Workspace-as-a-service (WaaS) vendor CloudJumper announced almost a dozen new features and upgrades in its Cloud Workspace Management Suite 5.2 release. The company also clarified the branding of the now combined CloudJumper and IndependenceIT products. CloudJumper in February announced plans to acquire IndependenceIT.
What was known as CloudJumper’s nWorkspace, also casually referred to as Cloud Workspace, will now officially be known as Cloud Workspace. This is CloudJumper’s full-service, or turnkey in-a-box, offering for MSPs.
Lynn Haber has the story on CloudJumper.
CloudJumper
Workspace-as-a-service (WaaS) vendor CloudJumper announced almost a dozen new features and upgrades in its Cloud Workspace Management Suite 5.2 release. The company also clarified the branding of the now combined CloudJumper and IndependenceIT products. CloudJumper in February announced plans to acquire IndependenceIT.
What was known as CloudJumper’s nWorkspace, also casually referred to as Cloud Workspace, will now officially be known as Cloud Workspace. This is CloudJumper’s full-service, or turnkey in-a-box, offering for MSPs.
Lynn Haber has the story on CloudJumper.
**Editor’s Note: Read our list of 20 top UCaaS providers offering products and services via channel partners.**
Unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) providers went wild with product announcements last month.
Broadvoice has an entirely new platform aimed at SMBs, RingCentral launched a new set of services, and Vonage announced a new cloud-native platform for the midmarket. We saw UCaaS providers target increased contact-center integration and SMB inclusion.
And CenturyLink got in on the action by adding the Cisco Spark collaboration tool to its UC platform. Other companies launched SD-WAN, cloud services and partner portals.
For a list of 13 major announcements, scroll through the gallery below.
Missed last month’s roundup? Catch up on the gallery featuring new services from February.
Follow news editor @JamesAndersonCP on Twitter.
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