The move highlights how unified communications and contact center capabilities are fast becoming inseparable.

The new package combines the calling and collaboration tools of RingEX with customer engagement features such as advanced queue management and a shared SMS inbox, creating what RingCentral calls a “lightweight contact center” experience.

“Over a million users rely on RingCentral RingEX as a lightweight contact center, enabling employees to respond to customers alongside everyday work,” said Kira Makagon, President and COO of RingCentral.

“The future is customer-centric — uniting AI, unified communications, and contact center capabilities.

“With the Customer Engagement Bundle, we’re empowering every organization to deliver experiences that build loyalty, boost efficiency, and drive growth.”

The move positions RingCentral squarely in the emerging space where UCaaS, CCaaS, and even CPaaS intersect.

As Denise Lund, Research Director at IDC, noted, “RingCentral’s CE Bundle exemplifies the integrated UC-CE convergence that IDC identifies as one of the fastest-growing segments in business communications.”

That convergence, Lund added, “addresses a critical gap for organizations that need robust customer engagement capabilities without full contact center complexity.”

UCaaS and CCaaS: From Integration to Convergence

For years, vendors have promoted integrations between UC and contact center systems. But now, as RingCentral’s announcement underscores, the focus is shifting toward true convergence: a single platform for both employee and customer communications.

Microsoft made a similar move earlier this year when it confirmed the general availability of Teams Phone extensibility for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

The feature allows both platforms to share the same voice infrastructure, simplifying deployments and streamlining billing.

By consolidating systems, companies like Sweden’s Sveriges Lärare – anearly adopter of Teams Phone extensibility for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center – have reduced operational complexity and empowered agents to collaborate directly with subject matter experts.

Christopher Ehlo, Sveriges Lärare’s Tech Lead, claimed that “by consolidating our telephony on one platform with Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency.”

Microsoft itself has described such moves as “essential for modern service delivery”, arguing that the lines between CCaaS and UCaaS are “vanishing fast”.

These developments mark a shift in how businesses think about communications infrastructure.

What was once a clear division between “front office” customer service and “back office” collaboration is rapidly dissolving.

The Enterprise Perspective

William Rubio, Chief Revenue Officer at CallTower, believes this convergence of UCaaS and CCaaS is being driven as much by employee expectations as by customer demand.

Indeed, speaking in an exclusive interview with CX Today from earlier this year, he said:

“There was always a big real focus on the customer side of the house. And I think ever since the pandemic, it’s changed, and now it’s really about what can we do to solve the business outcomes of our customers.

“What are the tools that we’re able to go ahead and give to our employees… to make it a win-win solution for both?”

Rubio added that the integration between UCaaS and CCaaS is “very critical” because contact center agents are increasingly pulling in colleagues from outside the contact center.

This concept, often referred to as swarming, has been a key selling point for Microsoft’s Dynamics-Teams integration and now finds a counterpart in RingCentral’s bundled approach.

Both vendors are responding to the same enterprise need: a seamless way for employees to collaborate across roles and deliver consistent customer outcomes, regardless of channel.

A Convergence Milestone

The RingCentral CE Bundle may not represent a full contact center overhaul, and in many ways, that’s precisely the point.

Many businesses don’t need the complexity of enterprise-grade CCaaS, but they do need to ensure customer conversations aren’t missed.

In that sense, RingCentral’s latest release serves a growing middle ground: organizations looking for customer engagement capabilities embedded directly within their everyday communications environment.

When taken alongside Microsoft’s moves and the broader market sentiment echoed by CallTower’s Rubio, it appears that the long-discussed convergence of UCaaS and CCaaS is no longer just a theory; it’s happening, and it’s reshaping how enterprises design their customer and employee experience strategies.

The move, first reported by The Economic Times last week, is the latest of several that Avaya has made to downsize its global workforce.

These started in November 2024, shortly after the appointment of Patrick Dennis as CEO, who formerly led Aspect Software (now Alvaria).

Since then, the cuts have stretched globally, with Europe and the Middle East hit particularly hard, and have not let up.

Indeed, a source even told CX Today that Avaya had offered all voluntary staff exit packages in August, a widely discussed move on public forums.

These moves are likely an attempt to drive profitability as the company fights to keep its on-premise enterprise base from switching to cloud rivals like AWS, Genesys, and NiCE.

In time, that will prove an almighty challenge, and The Economic Times has also suggested that Avaya has significantly scaled down work previously outsourced to third-party providers of support services, noting Wipro as a key example.

While closure of the India GCC does not appear to be on the horizon, Tim Banting, Head of Research & Business Intelligence at Techtelligence, warned:

From an enterprise buyer perspective, I would want to know what parts of my deployment depend on India GCC.

“This mirrors a broader trend in UC firms retrenching in response to financial pressure, shifting priorities, overhang from pandemic-era hiring, and competitive pressure.”

Steve Morris, CEO and Founder of NEWMEDIA, also spoke with CX Today about the possible effects of the layoffs. “With the loss of key Avaya personnel involved in supporting and product ops, continuity of response and support quality will be at risk,” he said. 

It generates internal anxiety that usually pushes customers to accelerate exit strategies even when this overlaps costs or results in interim duplicitous vendor ties.

As mooted, Avaya has endured a groundswell of cloud-based competitors hoping to poach from its install base in recent years. With frequent restructuring, customers may indeed be inclined to look elsewhere for their customer engagement and communication needs. 

Those outside of its top 1,500 enterprise clients are likely top of the list, with Avaya reportedly prioritizing its largest global customers, as reported after the company stopped support for its public CCaaS customers with fewer than 200 seats in June 2025. 

What Could Employee Cuts Mean for Avaya Customers?

With fewer employees, Avaya risks putting more weight on the shoulders of remote teams to cover support requests.  

In time, that could negatively impact response times, especially for those outside its top 1,500 global client list. 

As for Avaya itself, a sustained focus on cost- and job-cutting could fuel more negative headlines, which seem to have encouraged many businesses to switch providers since the company exited its second bankruptcy in seven years in 2023.

Additionally, it may cause Avaya to lean further on partners to drive forward its innovation story.

Yet, despite these uncertainties, Avaya continues to support its global customer base and bang the drum for its new Infinity platform.

Valued at just over $3.6 billion in 2023, industry analysts at Maximise Market Research predict it will soar to $11.4 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 17.8 percent.

For contact center leaders, the takeaway is clear: cloud-based platforms are no longer a niche option. They are fast becoming the default architecture for organizations that want to meet rising customer expectations without the burden of maintaining complex on-premises systems.

Why the Market is Surging

CCaaS offers enterprises the ability to unify customer interactions across voice, email, chat, and social media on a single platform.

With demand for frictionless, personalized experiences only increasing, these solutions have become vital for organizations that want to stay competitive.

At the same time, the rise of remote and distributed workforces has accelerated the move to the cloud. AI and automation are being woven into the core of modern platforms, enabling contact centers to reduce response times and provide agents with real-time assistance.

The Heavyweights Driving Growth

So far, the momentum is largely in the hands of a small group of dominant vendors. Genesys, NICE, AWS, Five9, and Talkdesk are the players most frequently highlighted by Gartner and other research firms as the clear leaders.

Each of these vendors has carved out an advantage. Genesys has been praised for its ability to support complex enterprise migrations. NICE has leveraged its strength in workforce engagement and analytics to cement its leadership. AWS, through Amazon Connect, brings hyperscaler scalability and a deep AI portfolio. Five9 has continued to deliver growth despite internal challenges, while Talkdesk has rebounded with strong industry specific specialization.

These companies not only offer stability but also the global reach and compliance capabilities demanded by heavily regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. For many large organizations, they remain the “safe bets” for large-scale deployments.

The Pretenders to the Throne

Yet dominance today does not guarantee dominance tomorrow. According to Zeus Kerravala, Founder of ZK Research, several vendors operating outside Gartner’s Magic Quadrant are worth watching closely.

One is 8×8, which Kerravala calls “the most obvious omission.” The company has a long history in the space and was among the first to bring UCaaS and CCaaS together — an increasingly important requirement for enterprises looking to consolidate internal and external communications.

8×8 retains a strong global footprint and high customer satisfaction ratings, making it a credible alternative for mid-sized organizations and beyond.

Another rising force is RingCentral. Long known for its UCaaS leadership, RingCentral now offers a dual play: a NICE-powered contact center product and its own homegrown RingCX platform, says Kerravala.

The latter is notable for fully integrating UC and CC, breaking down silos between front-line agents and back-office experts. Agents can escalate cases within the same system, improving first-contact resolution. Add in RingCentral’s aggressive AI roadmap — from conversational intelligence to real-time transcription — and its vast customer base, and it is easy to see why Kerravala views it as a potential challenger.

Then there is Microsoft. While left out of Gartner’s CCaaS Magic Quadrant, largely because of its classification as a “Customer Engagement Center” vendor, Microsoft’s influence cannot be ignored.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service combined with Teams provides many of the core capabilities of a modern contact center. For enterprises already invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem, the prospect of tighter UC and CC convergence, backed by the company’s global scale and AI capabilities, is a compelling proposition.

Finally, Kerravala points to UJET, a company he describes as a “mobile-first disruptor.” Unlike many of its rivals, UJET has not retrofitted desktop-first solutions for mobile use but has instead designed its experience natively for smartphones.

Customers can share photos, videos, and even make secure payments directly within an app. As mobile becomes the primary channel for customer interaction, UJET’s model represents a fresh and relevant alternative.

What Buyers Should Consider

For end-users — the leaders tasked with delivering efficient, empathetic customer experiences — the key message is not just that the market is growing, but that it is diversifying.

The established players offer proven scale and global reliability, making them attractive for enterprises that need maturity today. But the challengers are innovating in ways that may align more closely with the future of customer engagement.

Whether it is 8×8 and RingCentral driving UC/CC convergence, Microsoft bringing contact center functionality into the enterprise productivity stack, or UJET redefining the mobile experience, disruption could come from outside today’s leader board.

In other words, organizations buying CCaaS today should keep one eye on stability and another on innovation. The market may be set to triple in size, but the bigger question is: who will be sitting on the throne when it gets there?

Employees, entrepreneurs, creators, educators… they’re the ones driving progress every day.

For Zoom, that makes it different. It believes that Microsoft builds for IT and procurement, while Google bundles collaboration into its suite. Yet, it aims to deliver for the user.

For that reason, Zoomtopia’s theme is all about connecting people to progress.

That theme runs through all of Zoomtopia 2025’s announcements, with the top ten outlined below, starting with those that matter most to customer experience teams.

1. Zoom Bolsters Its Contact Center Partnerships with Salesforce & ServiceNow

As the Zoom Contact Center has surged, customers have requested tighter integrations with their customer support CRMs.

Zoom has acted by partnering with prominent CRM providers and embedding its contact center tooling within their solutions.

Its latest move is to make its real-time transcription, unified routing, and AI assistant technology available in Salesforce Service Cloud.

As a result, it delivers a unified agent experience (less Alt+Tabbing), consolidates support data, and lowers management burdens, as the two platforms overlap.

Zoom had previously launched a similar unified CCaaS-CRM offering with ServiceNow: Unified Engagement from Zoom CX and ServiceNow.

Yet, it has now taken this relationship further by launching an agent-to-agent integration, enabling AI Companion and Now Assist Agents to work together to solve cases.

As such, a contact center rep may communicate with a Now Assist Agent via the Zoom AI Companion interface and automate tasks in another part of the business that lead to a successful resolution. That’s an exciting new capability.

2. Zoom Debuts a New Conversational Intelligence Solution

Zoom CX Insights is a new addition to the enterprise communications giant’s CCaaS platform, offering a native conversational intelligence solution.

Yet, this isn’t just another dashboard filled with overwhelming amounts of data and information. Instead, it’s interactive.

As Michelle Couture, Global Product Marketing Lead for Zoom CX, summarized:

Leaders, supervisors, and managers can simply ask questions in plain language to uncover trends, spot issues, and coach their teams, without waiting on analysts or digging through complex dashboards.

Also, Couture suggests that CX Insights can deliver prescriptive guidance to help reduce churn, improve self-service, and boost overall customer satisfaction.

By taking this step and pulling together data to recommend specific actions that will improve customer, agent, and business outcomes, Zoom aims to lead the future of contact center reporting.

3. Zoom AI Expert Assist Goes Agentic, While Its Virtual Agent Also Gets a Big Boost

Zoom AI Expert Assist, its assistance solution for contact center reps, has gone agentic.

As such, with rep supervision, AI Expert Assist can take context from the session, reason with that context, and complete workflows on their behalf.

So, instead of just recommending a next best action, Agentic AI Expert Assist will offer to perform it.

The Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA), its customer assistance solution, went agentic in June. Yet, its latest upgrade takes this further, as Couture noted:

Powered by stronger models, it delivers smarter reasoning, more accurate responses, and the ability to manage more complex interactions.

Zoom is extending that foundation with new capabilities, including the integration of ZVA into its contact center quality management solution. That’s significant as both human and virtual agents can be scored and evaluated in the same way.

Finally, Zoom has added new templates for healthcare, concierge use cases, and deeper integrations with Zoom Phone, Amazon Connect, and numerous other rival communications platforms.

4. Sales & Marketing Teams Also Gain New Capabilities

Prospecting is a grind for sales reps, figuring out who is worth their time, engaging them, and sending follow-ups. Yet, these efforts rarely convert, and that slows the pipeline.

To combat that, Zoom is adding Agentic Prospecting to its Zoom Revenue Accelerator, its sales intelligence tool.

With this new capability, reps can drop in a list of webinar leads, and it gets to work. In doing so, it enriches each contact with insights, prioritizes the best opportunities, and sends personalized outreach immediately. It can also manage the back-and-forth until a meeting is booked.

Switching to marketing, Zoom has introduced Ask AI Companion for Webinars.

The solution allows people joining late, or who just want a recap, to ask AI Companion for instant summaries. They’ll get the additional context they need to catch up, without creating extra work for the host.

To further support the delivery of webinars, Zoom has also launched a Production Studio, enabling “TV-quality layouts, smooth transitions, and preloaded videos.”

5. The Zoom AI Companion 3.0 Is Here

Away from CX in isolation, Zoom has made other platform-wide updates. The launch of its AI Companion 3.0 is likely to capture the headlines.

At Zoomtopia 2023, Zoom released its AI Companion 1.0, which summarized meetings, extracted key takeaways, and surfaced next steps.

The following year came AI Companion 2.0, delivering platform-wide assistance, surfacing information, prioritizing tasks, and helping get more done.

Now, AI Companion 3.0 is going agentic, turning conversations into actions. It focuses on three core areas: uncover, optimize, and uplevel.

Uncover means surfacing insights from team meetings, chat threads, and cross-channel interactions. The new AI Companion Notetaker can help here, attending meetings (across any conferencing platform), taking notes, and capturing action items.

Optimize takes that insight and other conversation data to provide proactive assistance for users. The new “Free Up My Time” skill is an excellent example. With this, the AI Companion can analyze the calendar, recommend meetings to skip, and suggest option attendees for meetings the user runs. It also allows the user follow meetings remotely and receive key updates.

Finally, there’s uplevel. This aims to help users produce high-quality work faster, organizing schedules, creating briefing materials, guiding interactions, and structuring priorities. The new “Writing Assistance” skill is one to watch out for here. It doesn’t just help draft emails, proposals, reports, presentations, etc., it understands intent and business context to improve results.

To support the agentic AI Companion, Zoom will also launch a new web experience in November and an Enhanced Home tab in Zoom Workplace next year.

6. The Zoom AI Companion Comes to Slack and Microsoft Teams

Next month, Zoom will launch a native AI Companion experience in Slack, followed shortly by Microsoft Teams.

Ultimately, this means users can catch up on conversations, pull key insights, and schedule meetings simply by asking AI Companion, no matter which compatible collaboration tool they use.

The AI Companion will be especially useful for those who handle meetings across these collaboration tools, with Zoom striving to make its AI Companion available where their teams already work.

7. Meet Another AI Assistant: The Zoomie Group Assistant

As noted, AI Companion 3.0 can help users prep for meetings, providing proactive nudges, gathering insights from past conversations, agendas, and assets, and even suggesting additional prep.

During meetings, it also keeps discussions focused, prompts alignment on decisions, and helps lock in action items before the session ends. It can also kickstart those action items to turn discussion points into actions.

Yet, in addition to AI Companion comes the Zoomie Group Assistant, which can be activated by voice or chat in Zoom meetings.

Attendees just need to say “Hey Zoomie” in a Zoom Room, and it can answer questions, control the room environment, share screens, or launch a whiteboard.

The goal? To make collaboration faster and smoother.

8. More New AI Communications Tools (inc. Avatars)

Alongside the Zoomie Group Assistant, Zoomtopia teased many more AI tools to boost business communication in Zoom Workplace.

For starters, Zoom Clips can now transform static slide decks into dynamic video presentations “with just a few clicks.”

Additionally, users can add a custom AI avatar for a consistent on-screen presence and reach global audiences with automatic translations.

Yet, perhaps most fascinating is the introduction of photorealistic meeting avatars, which Zoom describes as a professional alternative to cartoon avatars.

In other words, it’s for people who don’t feel camera-ready but still want to impress.

9. Yet Another New AI Assistant, This Time for Zoom Phone

AI assistants are all the rage for Zoom, with the vendor announcing yet another, this time a Cellular Companion for Zoom Phone.

The Cellular Companion routes calls through the native mobile dialer while remaining compliant and audible via Zoom Phone.

Compatible with global carrier plans and dedicated mobile numbers, it bolsters Zoom’s ambitions to create an integrated experience across platforms, giving users the flexibility to work anywhere, even in low-bandwidth areas.

10. Zoom Unveils a Video Management Solution

Earlier this year, Zoom launched its Workplace for Clinicians and Workplace for Frontline solutions.

Thanks to these solutions, more video content is being generated on Zoom, including meetings, lectures, training sessions, etc.

The new Zoom Video Management solution aims to transform those videos into “powerful, shareable, and impactful assets.”

In doing so, educational institutions and enterprises alike can spend less time managing content and focus on what they do best.

Key features of the Video Management solution include:

• Automatic transcription makes every word searchable.
• Smart chapters and content summarization turn long recordings into digestible insights.
• Intelligent recommendations help surface the most relevant content from your video library.

CX Today is on top of all the big customer experience conferences this event season. To keep tabs on all the big announcements, subscribe to our newsletter.

Salesforce to Enter the ITSM Market at Dreamforce 2025 & Challenge ServiceNow

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has revealed that his company will enter the IT service management (ITSM) at Dreamforce 2025.

Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said:

“Come to Dreamforce and you’ll see. We’ve never been in the ITSM market before, but now we’re entering, and we’re building it on Slack.”

ITSM solutions help IT teams manage the services they deliver across the business. These “services” could include everything from giving someone access to an application and setting up a laptop to hosting internal applications and managing cloud storage.

ServiceNow is the dominant player in the ITSM space. Yet, Benioff suggests that Slack gives Salesforce a significant differentiator.

“ServiceNow is a great company,” he said. “I think they automate 9,000 companies… But Slack is already in a million companies, small, medium, large, and extra large.”

With Slack, Salesforce aims to build an ITSM solution within a “different kind of architecture” where humans and agents work together. The CEO continued:

Whether you’re managing assets in a company or configuring systems, the agentic capability is incredibly powerful. And if you can provide it right on your phone, in Slack, that’s really a next-generation UI.

Of course, many will view the move as a tit for tat. After all, ServiceNow has made big moves in CRM this year, aiming to usurp Salesforce as the “market leader” (Read more…).

ServiceNow Hasn’t Cut Its Customer Service Headcount, Despite Deflecting 75% of Cases

In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that AI advancements are leading to the ‘end of human customer service’.

Meanwhile, just three days ago, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, noted that his company had cut its customer service team from 9,000 to 5,000 employees after implementing Agentforce.

Yet, ServiceNow tells a different story. Its headcount has remained flat.

Indeed, despite deflecting roughly 75 percent of customer cases, its contact center team is no smaller than two years ago.

Amit Zavery, President, CPO, & COO of ServiceNow, shared the news in a discussion on Bloomberg Live.

One of the big reasons here, per Zamery, is that the company’s case volume has increased by 40 percent over the past two years, as the business has grown.

However, ServiceNow has also empowered its agents with their own self-service AI to not just give answers back, but engage in deeper discussions and solve their issues.

As such, while its headcount hasn’t changed, its customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates have, moving in a positive direction (Read more…).

HubSpot INBOUND 2025: The Top 10 Announcements

HubSpot is a tech provider that has done an excellent job of establishing a customer community and acting on feedback from it.

In doing so, it has honed in on the requirements of its sweet spot: the midmarket.

Companies in the midmarket don’t typically have the skillset or time to configure innovations, like AI agents, from scratch.

Instead, they typically want pre-built innovations to drop into their platforms, customizing them to their business, teams, and needs.

HubSpot is following that path, not jumping from the latest hot trend to the next.

While some may frame HubSpot as lagging the likes of Salesforce, its customers can match its speed, steadily advance, and prove results.

The announcements at HubSpot INBOUND 2025 aim to help its customers take their next steps.

From new data and configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions to pre-built AI agents and playbooks, you can find out all about the top ten announcements from the event here.

Microsoft Completes a Big Move to Converge CCaaS and UCaaS

Microsoft has confirmed the general availability of Teams Phone extensibility for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

In a nutshell, Teams Phone extensibility “extends” the Dynamics 365 Contact Center to share the same voice platform as Microsoft Teams.

As such, it removes the need for a separate telephony system. That simplifies deployments of the CCaaS platform for companies already leveraging Teams and streamlines the billing process.

Christopher Ehlo, the Tech Lead at Sveriges Lärare, echoed these benefits, with his company being an early adopter.

As quoted in a Microsoft blog announcing the move, Ehlo said:

By consolidating our telephony on one platform with Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency.

Ehlo also explained how the single phone system and familiar management tools helped lighten the administrative load.

Additionally, Teams Phone Extensibility aids contact centers that wish to empower contact center agents to send customer calls to subject matter experts (SMEs) across the business, who use Teams. That capability is often referred to as “swarming”.

More businesses are leveraging this functionality. As they do so, Microsoft claims that the lines separating CCaaS and UCaaS are “vanishing fast” (Read more…).

In a nutshell, Teams Phone extensibility “extends” the Dynamics 365 Contact Center to share the same voice platform as Microsoft Teams.

As such, it removes the need for a separate telephony system. That simplifies deployments of the CCaaS platform for companies already leveraging Teams and streamlines the billing process.

Christopher Ehlo, the Tech Lead at Sveriges Lärare, echoed these benefits, with his company being an early adopter.

As quoted in a Microsoft blog announcing the move, Ehlo said:

By consolidating our telephony on one platform with Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency.

Ehlo also explained how the single phone system and familiar management tools helped lighten the administrative load.

Additionally, Teams Phone Extensibility aids contact centers that wish to empower contact center agents to send customer calls to subject matter experts (SMEs) across the business, who use Teams. That capability is often referred to as “swarming”.

More businesses are leveraging this functionality. As they do so, Microsoft claims that the lines separating CCaaS and UCaaS are “vanishing fast”.

As this trend accelerates, the tech giant suggests that moves like this to converge the two technologies are “essential for modern service delivery”.

It’s also a sign of how Microsoft can leverage its leading UCaaS platform to differentiate the Dynamics 365 Contact Center. That said, it has offered select competitors the opportunity to deploy Teams Phone Extensibility, so their platforms share the same voice capability as Teams.

Nevertheless, speaking to CX Today in April, when news of Teams Phone extensibility for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center first broke, Finbarr Begley, Senior Research Analyst at Cavell, suggested the move could also “open a door” to broader adoption of Microsoft’s CCaaS product.

“What platform do I, as the customer, use? That’s a big question right now because of the rapid rate of change and the R&D spend from people like NiCE and Amazon,” said Begley.

“The fact that Microsoft is turning around and adding these capabilities, along with their AI expertise … is going to bring them back into the conversation.”

CCaaS and UCaaS Unification Is Happening… Slowly

With the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom pushing for CCaaS and UCaaS on one platform, more businesses are selecting unified solutions. That’s in the midmarket, at least. Enterprises have been slower at jumping on the bandwagon.

Indeed,  Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, revealed that he “hasn’t seen much momentum” behind it in this segment. However, he added:

I believe enterprises will eventually move in this direction.

The aforementioned swarming capability is a massive reason why, especially as contacts coming into customer service become increasingly complex with the rise of AI. Tapping that expert knowledge will become increasingly important.

As these contacts spread across the business, companies will also want to keep all conversations related to one case on the same platform to avoid journey blind spots and have that intelligence trickle into a single data record.

Additionally, with one communications platform, service teams can do less toggling and more easily share insights with adjacent departments.

Nevertheless, convergence is not limited to CCaaS and UCaaS.

Genesys, for example, has built integrations with Salesforce and ServiceNow that blur the lines between contact center and CRM.

NICE has also formed partnerships with both vendors and recently snapped up Cognigy to close the gap between CCaaS and conversational AI, too.

Microsoft may consider similar moves as it builds out its contact center story.

Yet, with a broader portfolio that also includes Power BI, Power Automate, and the wider Dynamics 365 ecosystem, there are lots of exciting moves it could take in the name of convergence.

The source revealed that Avaya hopes the move will shed “a lot of employees”.

CX Today has reached out to Avaya for a statement, but the company declined to comment.

The objective to shed employees is one Avaya has chased since its CEO transition, announced in July 2024.

Just four months later, Avaya kick-started a sweeping round of layoffs. While these initially impacted North America, they stretched across the globe by early 2025.

In January, CX Today learned the layoffs left some regions, including Europe and the Middle East, threadbare.

Now, Avaya appears to be following up with another drastic move to cut its staff further and leave some areas with little more than a remote presence.

Reacting to the speculation, Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, told CX Today:

Such a move would likely aim to maximize profitability, so Avaya can return profit to equity holders.

Having only emerged from a second bankruptcy in seven years in 2023, these headlines will fan the flames of speculation about Avaya’s long-term future.

After all, if and when it does return that equity to its holders, what’s next? Yet another reset for a company long defined by restructuring.

Avaya’s Future Hinges on Its Partners

Once dominant in contact centers and unified communications, Avaya missed the shift to CCaaS and UCaaS, despite initially experimenting with cloud-based services like Avaya OneCloud, AXP, Avaya Spaces, and Zang Cloud.

These experiments highlight Avaya’s troubling pattern of missing early market signals, weak execution, and late timing.

As a result, it has leaned more and more on its partners to overlay its core infrastructure with the latest cloud innovations. That led to a rising reliance on the likes of RingCentral, Verint, and Zoom.

It 2024 Annual Customer Report spotlights these alliances, with Verint powering CX automation and Zoom Workplace bolstering collaboration.

Yet, Verint’s new owner, Thoma Bravo, and Zoom’s own enterprise ambitions highlight the vulnerability in its story of outsourcing innovation.

Indeed, the strategy is playing with fire. If Thoma Bravo decides to completely restructure Verint and turn its roadmap upside down, many of Avaya’s customers’ roadmaps will be turned upside down.

Given how much of Avaya’s customer base are steady Eddie enterprises, that’s a big concern.

As such, the exits could also be a move to get out in front of future disruptions. Nevertheless, they’re not a good look for the trouble-plagued business.

The Bottom Line

Avaya’s cloud story has become increasingly fragmented, partner-reliant, and dependent on protecting its base. It’s not disrupting the market and chasing growth.

That’s evidenced by its reported strategy to fixate on keeping its top 1,500 global enterprise customers.

With that strategy, Avaya has framed itself as a stable choice for conservative, hybrid enterprise contact center environments.

However, the continued employee exits and the control its partners have over its own destiny somewhat counteract that image.

That will give its customers plenty of food for thought. For so long, they’ve valued continuity at the expense of reinvention. Yet, these similar, repeated headlines may make them question this approach.

Thanks to Tim Banting, Head of Research & Business Intelligence at Techtelligence, for co-authoring this article.

Indeed, its Q2 revenues rose 4.7 percent year-over-year (YoY) to $1.217BN.

A key driver behind that achievement is its contact center business, which continues to expand at a “high double-digit rate”.

Zoom execs shared several additional statistics during the earnings call, including “triple-digit growth” in its Elite tier contact center package geared toward enterprises.

Additionally, they highlighted how four in every five CCaaS wins now come through the channel.

However, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, revealed perhaps the most surprising statistic:

Our top ten contact center deals were all displacements of leading competitors, and all but one were cloud displacements.

Why is that surprising? Because CCaaS transformations involve a lot of legwork. As such, hopping between vendors is not an easy choice to make.

Analysts on the call picked up on this. In response to their questions, Yuan highlighted that it wasn’t necessarily Zoom’s role as a market disruptor that drove the migrations; it was the shortcomings of rival vendors.

“Many customers have been unhappy with their existing contact center providers,” he said.

If they were completely satisfied, no matter what we did, they wouldn’t want to switch. The reality is, they’re not happy.

“Sometimes it’s due to quality issues, frequent outages, high costs, resistance to innovation, poor architecture, or very slow AI adoption. The reasons vary.”

Like Zoom, CX Today has picked up on this trend and several more reasons for CCaaS dissatisfaction.

For starters, numerous CCaaS players offered “sweetheart deals” at the beginning of the pandemic when many contact centers rushed to the cloud to simplify remote working. Yet, as they come up for renewal and vendors charge their normal prices, businesses are reconsidering.

In addition to the ‘high costs’ Yuan mentioned, many providers require businesses to purchase a fixed number of seats annually under their CCaaS contracts. Companies with high seasonal demand now see an opportunity to reduce costs by switching to a more flexible pricing model.

On pricing, some vendors also locked contact centers into annual increases in seat numbers. As such, when service teams didn’t scale as quickly as anticipated, they paid a hefty price. That may have caused some resentment.

Another big reason is that many contact center leaders perceive they didn’t receive sufficient support post-deployment, which, as Yuan suggested, may have impacted AI adoption.

However, even those that did adopt AI have faced issues that reflect not so well on their vendors. For instance, many providers offer AI features at extra cost to their core offering. So, when contact centers add more, costs stack and the CFO takes offence.

Zoom can differentiate here, with its AI Companion included at no additional fee.

Nevertheless, Yuan believes that Zoom is winning customers not only because of its pricing model, reputation for being easy to work with, and high brand loyalty.

Discussing the CCaaS migrator wins, Yuan noted: “These customers are actively looking for modern contact center solutions. When they try Zoom, they often say, “Wow, I can’t believe this.”

“We offer nearly every feature they need, and more importantly, they trust us,” he concluded. “They trust the core Zoom platform and what it represents. Our company culture is focused on delivering happiness; we strive to delight our customers.”

Finally, Yuan noted Zoom’s product as a differentiator, highlighting how it built its platform entirely in-house to ensure a consistent user experience.

Other Big Takeaways from Zoom’s Earnings

Sticking with the Zoom Contact Center, the number of customers paying more than $100,000 annually for the platform grew by 94 percent (YoY) last quarter to 229.

As previously noted, new partnerships are helping drive that growth. One newly established collaboration is with PWC, which focuses on CCaaS and AI for the enterprise, per Yuan. He said:

Together, we have already co-sold several large deals, including a Fortune 50 technology firm for which PWC will provide advisory and implementation services.

Beyond the contact center, Zoom AI Companion monthly active users (MAUs) have grown over four times YoY. While the video communications pioneer didn’t share exact numbers, it noted that “millions” of employees now use the AI assistant.

They include 60,000 staff members at a Fortune 200 US tech company, which implemented the AI Companion last quarter.

Zoom Phone also sustained its “mid-teens” growth in recurring revenue, while WorkVivo has reached 168 customers paying more than $100,000 annually, up 142 percent YoY.

Much of that business has stemmed from the shuttering of Meta Workplace. For instance, Zoom won a 10,000-seat deal with Marubeni Corporation to migrate from Meta to WorkVivo.

Expect more news like this and innovation from Zoom’s September Zoomtopia event.

While recent innovations, such as the Zoom Virtual Agent 2.0, may take center stage, Yuan suggested many more significant announcements will come.

Indeed, the deal marks Salesforce’s third acquisition in three weeks, having previously reached agreements to purchase Bluebirds and Waii.

Yet, the Regrello deal brings something new, with the provider offering an AI-powered collaboration system for supply chain and operations.

The vendor’s technology supports enterprises that typically run their supply chain on a “decades-old” ERP, email, and spreadsheets.

These organizations face various issues, including a lack of visibility into operations, manual, error-prone processes, and inconsistent workflows across teams.

According to Aman Naimat, CEO of Regrello, the platform was established specifically to “eliminate” these enterprise friction points and automate processes circulating the supply chain.

Now, Naimat is excited to extend the company’s mission as part of Salesforce. He said:

Joining Salesforce gives us the reach and platform to bring agentic process automation to more organizations, helping teams break free from old, slow, and expensive ways of working to agile, AI-powered execution.

Notably, Regrello’s platform is backed by engineers from Google, Meta, and Palantir, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively and gain real-time visibility across the supply chain.

Moreover, the company boasts of a “security-first architecture” that delivers end-to-end protection, from secure coding practices in memory-safe languages to automated patching, encryption at rest and in transit, and continuous penetration testing.

A Boost for Slack & Agentforce?

In a press release, Salesforce signalled that the acquisition will boost Slack and Agentforce.

While it didn’t share more, the potential for Regrello’s tech to expand the scope of both solutions is clear.

Regarding Slack, it has the potential to extend the collaboration app and deliver a hub for logistics teams, where work actually happens instead of just being discussed.

On Agentforce, Regrello could enable new AI agents that automate processes that stretch from the supply chain into the front office and beyond.

Indeed, AI agents could automate updates from the supply chain to internal systems, with data ripple through sales, finance, or customer service.

Establishing this more connected, autonomous enterprise is key for Steve Fisher, President & Chief Product Officer at Salesforce.

“Businesses need greater agility, yet too often critical processes are hindered by disconnected tools and manual workflows,” he said.

Integrating Regrello will turn unstructured artifacts into coordinated workflows, bringing humans and agents together on the Salesforce Platform and giving every employee the ability to automate manual work, collaborate in real time, and deliver customer value faster.

The bottom line: Regrello’s ability to take isolated tasks and turn them into connected workflows could be a significant boost for both Slack and Agentforce.

Three Acquisitions in Three Weeks

The Regrello roll-up is the third acquisition Salesforce has announced since July 31, 2025.

Indeed, the CRM leader also shared its intention to snap up Waii and Bluebirds.

Waii is a startup that turns everyday language into SQL queries. Its tech lets non-technical users pull insights from complex databases without needing a data scientist.

A sales rep, for example, could ask: “Which customers in region A are up for renewal?” From there, Waii generates the SQL to fetch the answer.

Behind the scenes, it uses a self-learning metadata knowledge graph, essentially a smart, adaptive map of a business’s data.

For Salesforce, the acquisition is about making its data platform more intuitive and usable across the organization, so insights aren’t locked behind code.

Meanwhile, Bluebirds, the presales prospecting platform.

Bluebirds bundles targeting, data enrichment, and signal scoring, plus a prospecting agent that uses these insights to work on behalf of sales reps.

Salesforce plans to roll the agent into Sales Cloud and Agentforce, aiming to cut busywork and give reps more time to sell.

The RingCentral Contact Center is a dressed-up version of NiCE CXone Mpower, which features a tight integration with RingEX, RingCentral’s collaborations platform.

By combining these two technologies, businesses can converge CCaaS and UCaaS solutions that lead their respective Gartner Magic Quadrants.

In doing so, they can create a single, interoperable communications environment.

The relationship has lasted ten years and proved fruitful for both vendors. Now, Vladimir Shmunis, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of RingCentral, shared his excitement at prolonging the deal.

During the company’s latest earnings call, Shmunis stated:

We look forward to working with a NiCE team offering a best-in-class, integrated AI-powered cloud telephony and contact center suite that is the ideal choice for enterprises with complex and advanced use cases.

The extension will be music to the ears of many existing RingCentral Contact Center customers. After all, rumors of a soured relationship had spread across the industry.

These started back in November 2023, when RingCentral announced a competitive CCaaS solution: RingCX, which now has 1,200+ customers.

After, in July 2024, NiCE released its own UCaaS solution: NiCE 1CX.

The announcements generated plenty of speculation around the partnership’s long-term future. That only grew when RingCentral decided to migrate its own contact center team from the RingCentral Contact Center to RingCX in late 2024.

At the time, when discussing the NiCE partnership, Shumnis stated, “RingCX is our go-forward solution,” and didn’t commit to extending the relationship.

However, the partnership appears to be back on the right trajectory, and Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE, celebrated that news by committing to closer collaboration.

“We’re excited to work together to take our partnership with RingCentral to the next level, one defined by the seamless convergence of AI-powered customer and employee experiences,” he said.

The path ahead is about working together collaboratively to unlock more opportunities, and meet businesses wherever they are in their AI journey to modernize how they connect, collaborate, and serve their customers.

The extended partnership also supports NiCE’s vision to become a system of interaction, offering organizations a complete view of conversations around customer cases.

With many brands pushing cases across the business to various subject matter experts (SMEs) on platforms like RingEX, internal conversations now make up part of that view.

With 1CX, NiCE underscored its understanding of this. Yet, with RingEX, it can pull conversational insights from a widely-utilized, global solution into a richer customer view for many more organizations.

What Now for RingCX?

Despite the partnership, RingCentral doubled down on RingCX as a future revenue driver, noting that half of its $1MN+ deals last quarter featured the CCaaS solution.

Those included wins with a “leading” US-based restaurant chain and a university with 5,500+ employees leaning on RingCX.

Both businesses can now combine RingCX with RingEX and RingSense, RingCentral’s conversational intelligence solution, on one unified enterprise communications platform.

That is an excellent option for many businesses. But RingCentral recognizes that many larger enterprises have specific requirements only a broader platform can satisfy.

As such, many of the larger enterprises that utilize RingEX need a CCaaS alternative. The RingCentral Contact Center still presents an attractive option here.

Shmunis doubled down on this point: “RingCentral for UCaaS and NICE for CCaaS, they are extremely well received throughout, but especially in higher-end enterprises with more complicated needs.”

“The combination with RingCentral just continues this product, which was very successful from the get-go,” he concluded.

What Else Did RingCentral Share During Its Earnings?

Alongside the NiCE partnership, RingCentral announced it has expanded its relationship with AT&T, which will now resell RingCX and RingSense alongside RinEX.

The enterprise communications stalwart also named Vaibhav Agarwal its new Chief Financial Officer, an internal hire who succeeds Abhey Lamba. Lamba will, however, stay on until the year’s end as an Executive Advisor.

In terms of actual earnings, RingCentral announced quarterly revenues of $599MN, a five percent increase year-over-year (YoY), aligning with the high-end of its guidance.