From an expanded RingCentral and NiCE partnership to Microsoft's fresh agents-as-a-service play, here are extracts from this week’s most popular news stories.
Can RingCentral and NiCE Finally Unite UCaaS and CCaaS?
RingCentral has renewed its ability to market and sell RingCentral Contact Center, powered by NiCE CXone, for another year.
In addition, NiCE will resell RingCentral’s RingEX UCaaS platform under a new multi-year agreement.
As enterprises increasingly demand employee communications and customer experience technologies that work more closely together, this could be a significant move for both vendors.
Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, summed up that demand in a LinkedIn post, where she wrote:
“Finally!!! NiCE knows that some customers want a fully-integrated #UCaaS + #CCaaS or #CX solution, and it’s a checklist item on some RFPs.”
Indeed, NiCE has long been one of the dominant enterprise CCaaS players but has lacked a fully-fledged UCaaS offering alongside CXone. RingCentral, meanwhile, has sought to expand its relevance in larger enterprise CX deployments.
The expanded deal gives both companies a more compelling answer for buyers looking to procure the two together (Read more...).
From SaaS to Agents-as-a-Service: Microsoft’s Aims to Redefine the CX Tech Stack
With consumption-based billing and ‘agent-first’ architectures taking over, contact center budgets and workflows are about to become unrecognizable.
Microsoft’s Q4 FY2026 earnings call showed CX leaders how quickly enterprise software is shifting from static seats to metered AI work.
The main headline is that customer service is becoming one of the clearest proving grounds for a new software model: Agents-as-a-Service.
For years, CX leaders bought CRM, contact center, and productivity software by the seat. Microsoft is now pushing a different commercial logic, where companies pay for access, usage, and autonomous actions. That shift will change how contact center leaders budget, measure value, and design work.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO at Microsoft, positioned the change as a wider enterprise model:




