From committing support for legacy systems to more layoffs within the CX industry, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Layoffs Continue as It Grapples with Its Family Values
“Ohana” is a Hawaiian word that means family and support system. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has repeatedly used the term to define the CRM vendor’s culture.
Yet, the bleak layoff stories swirling the Silicon Valley stalwart have hit that reputation hard.
After mass exits in January, Salesforce has cut 258 more jobs. According to SFGATE – a San Francisco news website – these will impact staff in “sales and customer service,” “technology and product,” and “general administration.”
The news comes as activist investors make their presence felt, perhaps forcing Salesforce’s hand.
Much of their focus seems to be in shifting Slack from the forefront of Salesforce’s messaging. Indeed, the UC platform is picking up most of the – well – slack.
For instance, prior to this latest round of layoffs, The Register reported: “There’s no more Slack left to cut.”
The news is unfortunate, particularly as Slack is well placed within Salesforce’s portfolio. It overlays its CRM solutions and Contact Center Genie, with Einstien AI running between the stack. That is a potentially powerful enterprise communications proposition.
Yet, its formation appears to have come too late. After all, many businesses already switched to Microsoft Teams during the pandemic – largely due to the familiarity everyone has with Office – leaving little room in the UC space for Slack to exploit.
Indeed, Teams has cemented itself as the UC market leader, with 280MN users. Such a sizeable lead in a mature market is likely difficult to claw back, and the $28BN price tag on slack now seems overegged, to put it delicately.
The good news for Salesforce is that it remains the most dominant player in the CRM market – with IDC noting that it outsells Microsoft – its closest rival – by four to one in the space.
Cisco Commits to Supporting Its Legacy Contact Center Customers
Many rising trends are making CCaaS migrations more attractive.
Indeed, CCaaS players are adding new cloud capabilities at a rate of knots. AI’s potential to drive ROI is rising. And the need for rapid innovation is growing as the strategic value of CX heightens.
These are all excellent examples. Nevertheless, many contact centers have held their ground, causing some legacy vendors to take new steps in pushing their customers to the cloud.
This trend has not escaped the attention of Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. She noted:
Brands came out and said: “I’m not going to put any innovation on this [legacy solution]. I’m going to kill this very soon, or – as a business – I’m going to implode.”
Genesys is perhaps the most prominent example, recently announcing the end of its legacy innovation and culling its hybrid cloud platform.
Thankfully, Cisco has proven resilient.
Leveraging its extensive global resources, Cisco’s business model allows it to innovate across three separate contact center offerings. These are:
- Cisco’s On-Premises Contact Center – Bundling legacy hardware and software, this option allows businesses to deploy, manage, and customize an enterprise-grade contact center.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise – Here, Cisco wraps its legacy Unified Contact Center Enterprise solution with new microservices. It also adds Webex Connect, allowing its customers to use CPaaS tools to innovate quickly. Customers can do this while keeping much of their data on-premise.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center – Powered by the Webex Platform, the public cloud solution allows businesses to converge their UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. It also contains CPaaS on the back end for speedy innovation, possesses many native capabilities – including AI, analytics, and WFO tools – and boasts a booming ecosystem of third-party business systems.
In pushing forwards with this portfolio, Cisco enables its customers to operate completely on premise, entirely in the cloud, or to utilize the best elements of both.
8×8 Rues Lost Opportunities to Drive CCaaS Growth With Its UC Base
8×8 has not "done a great job" of using its UC customer base to cross-sell its contact center offering, according to Samuel Wilson, 8×8’s Interim CEO.
