Enterprise Connect is one of the largest events for business communications and enterprise networking, gathering 6,500 attendees and more than 200 exhibitors this year. It has experienced many challenges in its long history, mirroring in many ways the travails of the industry. We've previously noted how the event has been late to acknowledge emerging trends such as team collaboration and communications PaaS (CPaaS). Slack did not participate as a speaker or exhibitor until last year; however, for at least two years before that, whenever messaging came up in keynote sessions and panel discussions, the conversation invariably led to Slack. Similarly, vendors like Atlassian, Facebook and Twilio were notably absent from the event until recent years.

Nonetheless, team collaboration and programmable communications are now part of the conversation. This year, Enterprise Connect came back with a revamped agenda that included emerging topics such as the role that AI and speech technologies will play for customer engagement, the fragmentation in SaaS collaboration applications, and the growing relevance of programmable communications for contact center and unified communications. In this report, we provide an overview of major announcements, and our key takeaways from the event.

The 451 Take

It is notable that the three largest public cloud providers have headlined the keynote sessions at Enterprise Connect for the last three years. Its significance goes beyond providing scalable and reliable infrastructure for business communications. The presence of AWS and Google alongside Cisco and Microsoft highlights the growing relevance of AI in the industry. Cisco and Microsoft hold their own when it comes to AI, but it is clear that innovations are increasingly being driven by vendors that were not around in the earlier years of Enterprise Connect. The same can be said about programmable communications and the growing presence of CPaaS providers at the event. There is still work to be done. Topics such as mobile native communications and secure mobile messaging play an important role for business communications, and have yet to be featured in the agenda. However, despite its shortcomings and after nearly 30 years, Enterprise Connect continues to be relevant, and remains one of the industry's leading events.

AWS, Google, Cisco and Microsoft headline keynote sessions

This year, the conference keynote lineup at Enterprise Connect included representatives from longstanding incumbent providers Cisco and Microsoft, which shared the spotlight with AWS and Google. The latter are not newcomers to the space, but didn't move to stake out a claim at Enterprise Connect until recent years. All four highlighted the growing role that AI will play for customer and employee engagement, and the impact this will have on workforce productivity.

AWS has been a key industry player for more than 10 years, as a provider of cloud infrastructure for unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) vendors. Two years ago, it announced Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center, and Amazon Chime, a cloud-based service with capabilities for messaging, voice calling and video conferencing. It has kept a strong presence at the event since then, standing side by side with other UC and CC vendors.

Its keynote address, delivered by Pasquale DeMaio, general manager of Amazon Connect, highlighted the role that cloud computing and AI will play to drive innovation. He introduced AI Powered Speech Analytics for Amazon Connect, which provides real-time insights to help agents and supervisors improve the customer experience. It builds on pre-trained AI services that transcribe, translate and analyze customer interactions to assist agents during their conversations; it also provides sentiment analysis and conversation highlights.

DeMaio also announced new features for Chime including Chime Business Calling, which enables users to place and receive business calls and text messages, and Voice Connector, a scalable, pay-as-you-go voice traffic service. Other AWS updates included the Business Room Booking API for Alexa for Business (A4B), its intelligent assistant technology for workforce productivity.

Amy Chang, SVP & general manager for Cisco Collaboration, positioned cognitive collaboration, a new set of AI capabilities that provides aggregation of data and intelligence into UC and CC applications. She announced new capabilities including People Insights, which uses data from Accompany – the company founded by Chang that was acquired by Cisco last year – to provide real-time contextual information of people and companies within Webex meetings.

Other newly announced capabilities that support Cisco's approach to cognitive collaboration include intelligent framing, speaker tracking, and noise detection and suppression to optimize the user experience in Webex Meetings when joining with a Webex room device; the newly announced facial recognition feature to identify meeting participants with name and title; and Webex Assistant, which simplifies calling, meeting join and control with natural language voice controls. Webex Assistant includes Proactive Join, a feature that leverages proximity pairing and calendar integration, using employees' smartphones with Webex Teams to identify when they walk into a meeting room to ask them if they wish to join the meeting and automatically connects them to available devices and meetings. Webex Assistant and Webex App (Meetings) also support proximity features for device pairing content sharing.

Chang also provided an update on Jabber, reaffirming Cisco's commitment to its on-premises product. Chang mentioned that in the past year, Jabber grew from 36 million active users to 45 million. In contrast, Slack recently passed 10 million active users. She did not share details for Webex Teams, and it is difficult to assess how it compares to Slack and Microsoft Teams. We believe, however, that bringing Jabber into the conversation provides a different perspective – and a more accurate picture – of what the collaboration market looks like. Looking at the overall market, Cisco remains one of the top players, thanks to Jabber.

In her keynote presentation, Microsoft 365 general manager Lori Wright announced several updates for Teams, the communication and teamwork hub in Office 365 launched two years ago. They include customized backgrounds, content cameras and intelligent capture for capturing content such as information on analog whiteboards, Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings, and live captions and subtitles.

Newly announced security features include secure private channels, information barriers to limit which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other, and data loss prevention in chats and conversations. Microsoft also announced general availability for Live events in Microsoft 365, which enables users to create live and on-demand events using video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream or Yammer. Microsoft Teams won Enterprise Connect's Best in Show award for its vision of making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce, including first-line workers. As we've previously noted, Microsoft is ramping up the capabilities in Teams to address real-time communications requirements across a wide range of use cases and verticals, including education and healthcare.

Rany Ng, Google Cloud director of product management, emphasized how AI is built into G Suite products to help people make the most of their time. This includes features such as Smart Reply and Smart Compose in Gmail, and a Nudging feature that resurfaces messages for follow up. Google also showcased its real-time, AI-enabled conversation closed captioning. The company's presence at Enterprise Connect was evident in its partnerships with CC providers including 8x8, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys and Mitel, as well as CPaaS providers Twilio and Vonage (Nexmo).

Google is leveraging its capabilities for AI-enabled contact centers with multichannel conversational user interfaces for live agents, chatbots and intelligent assistants. Last year, it launched its Contact Center AI Solution, which builds on Dialogflow Enterprise Edition's features to help build AI-powered virtual agents for the contact center, and other tools to assist live agents to answer phone calls, determine intent, and figure out the best answer to callers' questions, as well as perform analytics.
 

AI, Team Collaboration and Programmable Communications Were Key Topics

AI was a hot topic at Enterprise Connect this year. In addition to the vendors headlining the keynote sessions, practically every CC vendor present at the event had a story to tell about AI-enabled capabilities to improve the customer experience, including a long list of vendors that are partnering with Google.

AI-related announcements included 8x8, which launched a comprehensive quality management and speech analytics offering that spans all customer voice interactions across the enterprise; IntelePeer, which recently launched Atmosphere Insights, an AI-enabled analytics platform; Talkdesk, which launched a Workforce Management platform; and Masergy, with a new AI-driven Intelligent Agent that brings together unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and CCaaS with chatbot and smart queuing functionality.

Team collaboration continues to be a key topic on the agenda. In addition to the previously outlined updates from Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex Teams, major announcements included Slack, which announced general availability of Enterprise Key Management. EKM, initially announced at Frontiers 2018, is a security control that can be purchased as an add-on to Slack Enterprise Grid, and enables control over the encryption keys used to encrypt the files and messages within the Slack workspace.

Interoperability was a recurring topic in keynote presentations and breakout sessions. We believe this reflects the fragmentation in SaaS collaboration applications, a challenge that is top-of-mind for IT decision-makers. Knowledge workers typically rely on multiple applications that coexist side-by-side, including stand-alone applications and UC platforms with built-in messaging features. We have yet to see major players tackle this challenge head-on, but the message from their keynote sessions indicates they have acknowledged this is a problem for many of their customers.

An emerging vendor looking to help enterprise customers deal with the coexistence of multiple collaboration tools is Mio, which aims to make Microsoft Teams, Slack and Webex Teams fully interoperable. Mio synchronizes channels between team chat apps and allows coworkers to send direct messages to each other from their tool of choice. Mio received the award for Best Innovation for Collaboration.

The growing relevance that team collaboration has for enterprise communications and collaboration was also evident in new devices from vendors like Poly (formerly Polycom/Plantronics). The company announced its new CCX phones for Microsoft Teams featuring HD voice and a color display. The devices extend the Teams experience to the desk phone; the CCX 700 features a camera for integrated video calling with Skype for Business. Poly also announced its VVX x50 Series Obi Edition phones, which are the first Google Voice-certified IP phones. Last year at Cloud Next, Google announced the enterprise version of Google Voice – available via an early-adopter program – with contextual and intelligent features such as voicemail transcriptions and call filtering.

Other devices featuring integration to Microsoft Teams include speakerphones from Jabra, Sennheiser and Yealink, all of which have dedicated Teams buttons that allow quick access when connected to the user's PC or mobile phone.

CPaaS is Going Mainstream

Programmable communications has become a major topic at Enterprise Connect. In recent years, the event has included a dedicated track for embedded communications and APIs. This year, all the major CPaaS providers – including Bandwidth, IntelePeer, Ribbon Communications, Twilio, VoIP Innovations, Vonage (Nexmo) and Voxbone – were present on the show floor.

CPaaS-related activities included the third annual TADhack-mini the weekend before, sponsored by Flowroute (West), Apidaze by VoIP Innovations, and TeleSign. Participating developers worked on a range of communications-enabled applications that spanned use cases in healthcare, emergency services, tourism and travel, and social networking.

A key announcement that highlights the direction the industry is heading came from AT&T, which launched an API marketplace that provides turnkey applications for businesses to embed real-time messaging, voice and video communications into their websites and applications. The marketplace enables businesses to easily add or upgrade services to their websites, such as click-to-connect voice, video and text, as well as two-factor authentication, conferencing and virtual directories.

The AT&T API Marketplace is built on Ribbon Communications' Kandy platform, which allows enterprises to enhance customer interactions with web and mobile real-time communications via simple APIs and packaged applications. AT&T's announcement at Enterprise Connect follows Netherlands-based service provider KPN, which also recently announced a new API store using the Kandy platform and other CPaaS providers. KPN's API store gives businesses the option of deploying pre-built applications or using its APIs to develop custom applications.

451 Research believes the AT&T API Marketplace should be a wakeup call to other Tier 1 carriers. We see CPaaS as one of the underlying technologies enabling the contextual experience for customers and employees. We project a strong and growing demand for CPaaS as it expands beyond developers and startups, and adoption in the enterprise segment takes off. This is a large and lucrative market, and it will continue to grow given the focus on the user experience that is driving adoption for embedded, real-time communications for employee- and customer-interfacing interactions.

Other CPaaS-related announcements include Vonage, which announced Number Programmability for its Vonage Business Cloud platform. The service enables any phone number to be programmatically routed to a host of API-driven capabilities, allowing organizations to easily customize their communications system. Prior to the event, RingCentral announced RingCentral Embeddable, which enables developers to easily embed communications into their enterprise applications with capabilities such as account record screen pop with inbound call, click-to-dial, click-to-SMS, access to softphone settings, and messages and call history. RingCentral also announced extensions to its API library with new e-discovery and message-retention APIs.

Bigger is Better: Mergers and Rebranding Announcements

Other notable announcements include LogMeIn, which joined Poly with rebranding news by launching GoTo and GoToConnect as part of its new branding. GoTo is the company's new UC and collaboration suite of products that includes Jive, the cloud-based UC platform it acquired early last year. It complements the company's portfolio, which includes its flagship meeting and webinar offerings, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, as well as a new conference room product called GoToRoom.

Business communications provider PGi announced a UCaaS offering via its GlobalMeet platform, along with expanded AI-enabled smart collaboration capabilities focused on helping users save time and improve productivity through automation. They include Active Directory Integrations with Office 365 for managing meeting participants, meeting recording reminders to keep teams on track after a meeting ends, and live transcripts and meeting summaries that allow users to quickly scan the content of a meeting. Another productivity feature is the GlobalMeet widget, which allows users to access key features and functionalities, even if the GlobalMeet screen is minimized while users work on other items during a meeting.
Raul Castanon-Martinez
Senior Analyst, Workforce Collaboration and Communications

Raúl Castañón-Martínez is a senior analyst based in Boston focusing on business communications and collaboration technologies such as enterprise messaging, voice, bots, speech recognition and unified communications.

Brenon Daly
Research Vice President

Brenon Daly oversees the financial analysis of 451 Research's Market Insight and KnowledgeBase products, having covered more than a quarter-trillion dollars' worth of deal flow for both national publications and research firms.

Partick Daly
Analyst, Information Security

As an Analyst in 451 Research’s Information Security Channel, Patrick Daly covers emerging technologies in Internet of Things (IoT) security. His research focuses on different industrial disciplines of IoT security, including the protection of critical infrastructure, transportation and medical devices.

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