Collaboration platforms are one of the hottest areas of technology that we examine at UC Today. Enabling effective communication and teamwork the platforms are becoming a vital business system within industry and professional environments. With the enormous rise in their uptake, the security of the platforms appears to have taken a back seat. Shadow IT is another aspect of business communication that organisations need to address to combat the use of consumer collaboration and communication tools. In this episode we discuss security with Wire who are arguably the world's most secure collaboration platform. 

Omnichannel communication now forms the basis of customer to business interactions across the globe with the days of single communication paths behind us. But why is omnichannel communication so important and is it getting harder for organisations to offer viable omnichannel customer experiences? Zendesk are one of the world's leading providers of customer service and support software and they examined why companies are looking to omnichannel to improve their CX provision. Their benchmark report analysed data from more than 45,000 of their customers in 140 countries and today we talk to them about the findings in detail. 

One of the most important aspects of any business are its communication systems. Connecting the organisations, often, global workforce, enabling communication with customers and partners is critical to operational success. How can you be sure that your systems are working as well as they can be? In this episode we examine the sort operational efficiency goals that organisations should be setting themselves and how best they can achieve those.

Contact Centre is one of the fastest developing areas that we cover at UC Today. We hear from leading provider Five9 to examine their full portfolio. The world of the contact centre is changing so we wanted to understand how different products and services suit different customer requirements. As one of the leading providers of customer contact centre solutions we asked to break down their full product portfolio for us in this episode.

It has been a record breaking summer around the globe weather wise and the scorching temperatures have been mirrored in the hot bed of news and gossip within the unified communications and collaboration industries. The UC Today team look back over the last few months to summarise all the latest news for you. The team look back at the recent events, provide a news round up and look ahead to the next couple of months. 

More and more businesses are looking to the cloud to host their next communication platform. The enhanced feature availability, flexibility and resiliency offered by cloud platforms is becoming more and more appealing to organisations. The landscape in terms of provisioning is transforming rapidly and with the greater spectrum of options now available the decision on which path to choose is undoubtedly a difficult one. Avaya have made a huge effort to transform their offerings to specialise in cloud platforms and today we hear from some of their experts to break down the options available so that navigating the cloud course can be a little bit more simple. 

The explosion in the amount of data available is transforming our ability to analyse business interactions throughout industries. This explosion is only expected to continue with the rise and onset of IoT. But how can organisations utilise this data for their benefit? Not all data is good data and being able to clarify the relevant sources from the background white noise is critical in enabling the most enhanced analytics. With the developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, optimisation of analytics is not so much a future concept as it is with us right now. Workforce optimisation and analytics specialists Calabrio join Patrick on the podcast to discuss the topic. 

Augmented, mixed and virtual reality are some of the most exciting technologies emerging at the moment. But what are the different realms of reality? This episode of Out Loud explores the differences, benefits and practical applications of each realm. Our expert guests explains the nuances of each and provides some examples of how these can we used within industry and business.

Cavell Group is the thought-leader in the European future voice and VoIP marketplace providing analytics and insights across the industry. In June this year they hosted their Cloud Comms Summit in Washington DC and we were there to bring you all the news and themes from the event. Along with the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA), Cavell hosted the summit which is the leading event for Service Providers in the cloud communications industry to share best practices, discuss key trends and meet the industry vendors. One of the attendees were 2600Hz, whose business is founded on the premise of open source communications.