From surprise leadership changes to new CX product bundles, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
RingCentral CEO Tarek Robbiati Steps Down After Three Months In the Role
RingCentral has announced the departure of Tarek Robbiati, who will leave the CEO role and Board of Directors with immediate effect.
The departure comes by mutual agreement, and RingCentral stressed that the change is unrelated to internal disagreements.
However, it has paved the way for Vlad Shmunis, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of RingCentral, to resume his full-time role as CEO, a spot he handed to Robbiati in September.
Indeed, RingCentral made that original announcement while citing Robbiati’s financial nous, as the former Chief Financial Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sprint.
As such, the provider’s probable plan was for Robbiati to keep the RingCentral ship running smoothly, freeing up Shumnis to move into a more visionary role.
There, he could dream up the next best enterprise innovations and re-establish his reputation as the "Godfather of UCaaS".
Yet, despite a seemingly strong earnings update in November – where RingCentral edged closer towards profitability while maintaining double-digit revenue growth – that plan soon bit the dust.
For his part, however, Robbiati bid RingCentral a fond farewell. “I have the utmost respect for the RingCentral team,” he said. “I wish the company and its people the very best. (Read on...).
Salesforce Releases New ‘Unlimited Edition+’ Bundles
Salesforce has introduced ‘Unlimited Edition+’ (UE+) bundles that mix and match Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Einstein AI, Slack, Tableau, and Industries.
These bundles make it simpler to buy and deploy Salesforce technology, with the CRM leader also noting how the bundles will help organizations scale faster.
Such simplified purchasing comes as customers leverage more of Salesforce’s broad portfolio and embrace its Einstein 1 platform architecture.
Indeed, nine of Salesforce’s top ten deals in Q3 included six or more clouds.
Diving deeper, Bill Patterson, EVP of Corporate Strategy, spoke about the benefits of its new bundles: "Our customers are consistently evaluating and working to simplify their complicated technology portfolio and are looking to us to help them be more productive and efficient.
These new bundles provide the best of Salesforce to help our customers across industries move faster, reduce complexity, and better compete with the latest technology as they navigate this new AI era.
The UE+ bundles come at a time when businesses are looking to leverage AI, but limited access and connectivity are making it a challenge to do so.
Indeed, Salesforce research has shown that while 57 percent of IT leaders believe generative AI is a "game changer", 60 percent say they are unable to integrate it into their stacks.