By integrating augmented and virtual reality technologies with 5G, several industries could reap significant benefits. But beware of some important limitations.

5G is rapidly becoming the default technology for cellular wireless networks. New variants of 5G even offer the opportunity to replace wired WANs. As 5G availability continues to grow, so do the opportunities to use its high bandwidth and low latency for new and exciting use cases.

One area of increasing interest is 5G’s support for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Let’s explore five ways that AR and VR can use 5G.

1. Customer service and support

Today, most customer engagement consists of calls or text messages with contact center agents. By using 5G’s speed, along with AR and VR applications on mobile devices, companies can provide customers with real-time guidance.

For example, a customer trying to assemble a complex piece of equipment could get live help, via AR, that overlays specific instructions on top of what the customer is seeing. In this scenario, a product expert can guide the customer toward completing necessary steps.

Another possibility is using AR for product demonstrations. For example, customers could see what they look like in clothes before they buy them. Or they could see how a paint color would look before applying it. Anyone looking to remodel a kitchen could see an overlay of the final design on top of their current kitchen.

Additionally, sales personnel could walk someone through all aspects of a product before purchase. Imagine taking a guided VR tour of a new vehicle, including the interior and its features, without having to visit a showroom.

In all cases, combining the right hardware with 5G technologies opens possibilities to improve the customer experience and sales activities.

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Hold on to your hats. Just when we’ve all gotten comfortable with our communications and collaboration apps, they’re poised for significant change. One change agent? Generative AI, of course.

As my colleague Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst for workplace collaboration technologies, points out in a recent Metrigy webinar on emerging collaboration apps, “The way that we communicate and collaborate with applications is going to not resemble anything a year or two years from now what it is today” because of generative AI.

Generative AI is too radically transformative to ignore, and few vendors have. We’ve seen generative AI announcements this year from just about every provider of communications and collaboration apps, from Cisco to Dialpad, Microsoft, RingCentral, Slack, Zoom… to name a few. We’ve seen the table stakes, like generative AI-powered transcription, translation, and summarization for meetings, and we’re getting a glimpse of the increasing sophistication that’s coming.

Toward the latter point, for example, last month at WebexOne Cisco showed how advanced technology could adapt to a participant’s in-meeting behavior. The participant gets up and walks away from their desk, and the meeting auto-mutes and turns off the camera. When the participant returns, they’d receive a generative AI-created summary of missed talking points, plus the ability to ask questions on what was missed.

Despite all the vendor activity, no enterprise organization should be rushing headlong into the use of generative AI at this point, however. Vendors have some rough edges to polish, such as accuracy of their generative AI translation, transcription, and summarization engines, and trust to build around their data use and, potentially, pricing models. And companies will have their own issues to address, as well, such as whether generative AI might negatively affect company culture. Will employees be all business, all the time, during meetings if they know AI is listening in and sharing summaries? Will they lose the sense of camaraderie that binds them together and working well toward common goals?

The best advice for IT leaders at the moment is to be proactive and keep up to date on how communications and collaboration providers are bringing generative AI into their portfolios. Look to get a solid understanding of how the technology works and consider the value for employees, but do so with an eye on how to implement generative AI in a way that employees can trust and are comfortable with and that meets the corporate compliance and security requirements without crippling budget.

And, know that generative AI is but one technology changing the future of communications and collaboration. Discover others in Metrigy’s “Emerging Collaboration Apps” webinar, replay now available on demand.

The collaboration application landscape is rapidly changing. Generative AI offers the potential to improve productivity and streamline employee engagement. New apps are quickly arriving that aim to bridge the home and office employee divide. And, employee experience platforms offer new ways to share information and establish employee relationships no matter the location. In this webinar we’ll share the top five emerging collaboration applications and what IT and business leaders need to do to ensure success.

 

Metrigy has published its first ranking of UCaaS providers, based on market share, financials, market share momentum, product mix, customer sentiment, and customer business success. In this episode, discover which providers made the list.

As workplace strategy stabilizes, danger lurks in diminished focus on employee experience—especially amid other business challenges.

Your company’s workplace strategy for 2023 and beyond has stabilized, and employees are more or less back to their old routines or accepting of their new ones. Does that mean we can expect to see a diminished focus on employee experience?

Unfortunately, the answer will be “yes” for some companies—especially in the face of other factors impacting the business. Consider this anecdote shared with me regarding employee experience posture at a family-owned, privately held manufacturing company. This company recently laid off roughly 10% of its workforce, including the department created during the pandemic with the charge of optimizing employee engagement.

What I’m sharing comes from a manager at the company, but not somebody personally involved with the decisions around employee engagement. From their recounting and perspective, however, it seems the company recognized the rising interest in employee experience in the world at large and proceeded to create—and hire for—an employee engagement department without putting enough rigor around its decision. Not doing so led to one big mistake and a crippling problem.

The big mistake: The person leading the employee engagement strategy was a remote hire, in keeping with the times in which they were hired. However, most of the company’s employees weren’t remote nor, as plant workers or employed in the headquarters location, would they ever be. Working remotely—not even in the same city but in a different state and region—this employee engagement leader had no physical or emotional connection to other employees. They were, literally and figuratively, worlds apart.

Continue reading at workspace-connect.com.

For many companies, the choice in deploying Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) platforms isn’t just cloud or on-prem, nor is it just office vs remote workers. Rather, it is, “Which mix of applications and services minimizes operational costs and maximizes productivity?” A hybrid assortment of platforms enables companies to support users where they work (fully remote, hybrid, or full-time in-office) with a much broader range of UC&C capabilities while minimizing operational costs. This hybrid UC&C ecosystem creates its own challenges, though—primarily how to best manage multiple platforms, both on-premises and cloud, and how to effectively support employees regardless of their work location. Organizations can achieve quantifiable benefit via the automation of complex workflows that are location, technology, and vendor agnostic using specialized tools for UC administration management.

Metrigy research data, collected from more than 1,400 global participants for our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 2023 study, shows that successful companies, using specialized UC administration management tools, achieve the following benefits:

Therefore, Metrigy recommends that business and IT leaders evaluate UC&C administration platforms to reduce IT Infrastructure operating costs, improve speed of deployment, and streamline ongoing provisioning and management activities. Specifically, they should:

Download the full report at kurmi-software.com.

Companies are finding it more challenging than ever to comply with E911 regulations. Learn how you can minimize risk and ensure your workforce remains safe.

Ensuring 911 calls are routed and responded to correctly is a challenge that has grown more complex as companies embrace the cloud and usher in the hybrid workplace. One thing that hasn’t changed: The key requirement that calls placed to 911 emergency call centers reach the right operator and that the operator can determine the caller’s location.

Let’s examine what you can do to navigate E911 in a hybrid workplace and ensure compliance.

Editor’s note: This tip provides no legal guidance. We recommend those responsible for 911 location and call routing management consult with appropriate legal counsel to determine their organization’s risk and potential liability.

Understanding compliance

In the United States, companies are subject to both federal, as well as state and local government, regulations. At the federal level, two key laws are Kari’s Law and RAY BAUM’s Act.

Kari’s Law, in force for multiline phone systems sold, leased or installed after Feb. 16, 2020, requires that all phones can directly dial 911 without requiring users to punch in a prefix, such as an 8 or 9, to reach an outside line. It also requires that appropriate personnel, such as on-site security, are notified whenever a 911 call is made. Additionally, it mandates 911 calls sent to an emergency call center (ECC) or a public safety answering point (PSAP) must include a valid callback number to enable the operator to reach the original caller if the call is lost.

RAY BAUM’s Act mandates that calls placed to 911 provide a dispatchable location, which the Federal Communications Commission defines as a validated street address of the calling party, plus additional information, such as apartment, suite or desk location, adequate enough to identify the caller’s location.

In many cases, building access is restricted so it’s critical that front-desk security personnel are aware that a 911 call was placed from within the building and the caller’s actual location.

Unfortunately, not all companies adhere to regulations. According to Metrigy’s “Workplace Collaboration 2023-24” study of 440 companies, just 63% of organizations with offices in the United States complied with both Kari’s Law and RAY BAUM’s Act.

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Think about UC as a service (UCaaS) today, and Microsoft Teams will undoubtedly come to mind.

Any business using Teams for meetings and collaboration services would be foolish not to consider the app for voice, too, as they transition their calling infrastructure from on-premises or hosted environments into the cloud—as many are wont to do. By now, the story is well known:

Teams adoption soared during the pandemic as companies took advantage of the capabilities already afforded them by their productivity suite license to provide their suddenly work-from-home employees with meeting and collaboration services that were easy to use and implement. Calling has become the next step forward, and in a matter of a few short years, Microsoft’s positioning in the UCaaS market has gone from nonexistent to dominant.

This is a simplified version, of course, but the point is that Microsoft sits atop a heap of UCaaS providers with the largest installed base of phone seats worldwide. And it’s almost inconceivable that any competitor could topple Microsoft from this leadership position in the foreseeable future.

Little surprise, then, that Microsoft is the undisputed leader among the top 10 leading providers profiled in Metrigy’s inaugural UCaaS MetriRank 2023 report.

Part of our MetriCast Service, this UCaaS MetriRank report assesses leading providers on a fixed set of five criteria—financial strength, market share momentum, product mix, customer sentiment, and customer business success—to determine which are best positioned today and for long-term success. We rated each UCaaS provider in each of the five areas on a five-point scale, and then applied a weighting. Lastly, we tallied the individual criteria scores for each provider to determine their overall leadership score.

With Microsoft on top, which providers are next? Cisco takes the No. 2 spot, followed by Zoom, 8×8, and, rounding out the top five, RingCentral. In alphabetical order, Comcast, GoTo, Nextiva, Verizon, and Vonage comprise the rest of the top 10.

Full details, including all of our methodology, scoring, and a deep dive on each provider, is available in the UCaaS MetriRank 2023 report. Click here to learn more and watch for MetriRank reports on communications platform as a service and SIP trunking coming soon.