Cloud Communications News & Updates

Avaya has divested its networking patent portfolio to PowerBridge Networks, a newly introduced patent-licensing company founded by intellectual-property veteran Dr. Donald Bitting. The transaction includes more than 500 patents and patent applications across roughly 390 patent families, covering a range of enterprise networking technologies used in telecommunications and IT infrastructure. By transferring these assets, Avaya is divesting a significant portion of its networking patent portfolio.

PowerBridge Networks plans to organize and license the acquired patents to technology companies that incorporate these networking innovations into their products and services. The company’s strategy focuses on acquiring patents that are no longer core to the original owner’s business and enabling broader commercialization through licensing. For Avaya, the sale reflects a continued shift away from legacy networking technologies as the company concentrates on its cloud communications and contact center platforms. Learn more from the original announcement.

Private equity firm Court Square Capital Partners has acquired CallTower from BV Investment Partners, marking a significant ownership transition. CallTower operates as a global cloud-managed service provider offering integrations with platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco, Zoom, Five9, and Genesys, positioning itself as a vendor-agnostic partner for complex enterprise environments. Under its previous backer, BV Investment Partners, the company made notable strides including the 2025 acquisition of Inoria, which expanded its capabilities in customer experience and contact center solutions.

With the new investment, CallTower aims to expand its distribution channels, enhance its proprietary technology, and bring modern communications platforms to more enterprise organizations globally, with Court Square's backing expected to support organic growth, potential acquisitions, and broader international expansion. BV Investment Partners and CallTower's leadership team will retain a minority stake in the business. Learn more at UC Today.

26North Partners has agreed to acquire Intermedia Intelligent Communications. Intermedia offers services such as unified communications, contact center capabilities, Microsoft Teams integrations, business email, security, and productivity tools, and serves more than 150,000 business customers through a partner ecosystem of over 7,500 providers. The company generates more than $430 million in annual recurring revenue and has experienced growth as organizations continue migrating from legacy on-premises phone systems to cloud-based communications platforms.

The acquisition aligns with 26North’s private-equity strategy of investing in established technology platforms with recurring revenue and growth potential. Intermedia’s leadership team, including CEO Michael Gold, is expected to remain involved and invest alongside the new owner, while 26North plans to support expansion through operational resources and strategic guidance. The firm cited Intermedia’s partner-focused distribution model, strong service reputation, and increasing use of AI across its platform as key reasons for the investment. Learn more.

Salesforce has announced Agentforce Contact Center, a new contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform designed to combine AI agents, voice and digital communication channels, and CRM data within a single native system. Announced at Enterprise Connect 2026, the platform aims to address a common problem in contact centers where customer information and interaction data are spread across multiple tools. By consolidating these capabilities on the Salesforce platform, Agentforce provides a unified view of the customer, allowing both AI agents and human representatives to access the same data and conversation history during interactions. This approach is intended to improve context, reduce the need for customers to repeat information, and enable smoother handoffs between automated and human support.

The solution includes features such as native telephony, AI-powered digital and voice agents, intelligent routing, and a unified agent workspace that brings together calls, messaging, CRM records, and analytics. Salesforce positions Agentforce Contact Center as an “agentic” platform where AI agents can resolve routine requests autonomously while escalating complex issues to human agents with full context. The company argues that integrating AI, communications channels, and CRM data into one platform reduces the need for complex integrations and enables more personalized, efficient customer service. Learn more at No Jitter.

RingCentral announced AIR Pro, a new voice-first AI agent platform designed to automate customer interactions within its CCaaS and UCaaS ecosystem. The platform allows organizations to build and deploy AI agents that can handle conversations across voice and digital channels such as SMS and chat. Using a no-code environment called AIR Pro Studio, businesses can create AI agents through natural language prompts. These agents can understand customer intent, authenticate users, and complete multi-step actions such as opening service cases, triggering workflows, or scheduling follow-ups, enabling automation beyond simple chatbot responses.

AIR Pro builds on RingCentral’s broader AI portfolio—including AI Receptionist (AIR), AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), and AI Conversation Expert (ACE)—which together support customer interactions before, during, and after conversations. The new platform reflects a wider shift in the contact center industry toward agentic AI, where AI systems actively perform tasks rather than just assist human agents. RingCentral simplifying industry-specific deployments such as healthcare, with prebuilt templates and integrations designed to accelerate adoption. Overall, the launch reinforces RingCentral's strategy to embed AI deeply into communications platforms so human agents and autonomous AI can collaborate to improve customer engagement and operational efficiency. Learn more at UC Today.

Verint announced that the combined company formed from its recent transaction with Calabrio will operate under the single corporate name Verint as part of a unified go‑forward brand. The Calabrio product name will remain in the portfolio, with its workforce engagement solutions supported and enhanced within the broader Verint CX Automation Platform. Verint said the move simplifies its branding and underscores its unified vision for delivering AI‑powered customer experience automation, combining Verint’s global scale and data capabilities with Calabrio’s workforce engagement tools. Learn more in Verint Press Release.

NiCE has introduced Cognigy Simulator, a new solution designed to help enterprises rigorously test, evaluate, deploy, and scale production-grade AI agents used in customer experience (CX) operations before they go live with real customers. The simulator creates a controlled environment that mimics realistic user interactions — including unlikely or unusual scenarios — so organizations can launch thousands of synthetic conversations and measure how well an AI agent performs across key criteria like task completion, compliance with safety guardrails, integration reliability, and overall experience quality. This approach aims to build confidence and reduce risk by providing quantitative data about an agent’s behavior rather than relying on limited manual tests or small sample sets.

By replicating varied customer personas and behaviors, Cognigy Simulator helps detect weaknesses that might be missed by simpler scripted tests, such as incorrect assumptions, looping dialogs, or inconsistent performance across channels like voice and digital interfaces. It also supports automated regression testing, comparisons between different agent versions or configurations, and ongoing evaluation throughout the build, deploy, and optimization cycles — enabling CX teams to continually improve AI-driven interactions while minimizing errors and customer friction.

Learn more at CX Today.

8×8 has acquired Singapore-based Maven Lab to strengthen its presence in the Asia-Pacific market by integrating Maven Lab’s cloud-based customer engagement and enterprise messaging platform, Moobidesk, into the 8×8 Platform for Customer Experience. The deal brings local messaging expertise and talent to 8×8, helping it navigate the fragmented APAC landscape and offer secure, high-volume customer communications across more channels and countries. The acquisition aims to unify fragmented stacks used by multinational enterprises, improve regulatory compliance and data residency, and shift focus from simple notifications to orchestrated, end-to-end engagement, addressing regional complexity and boosting 8×8’s localized capabilities.

Learn more at UC Today.

Five9 has announced the appointment of Amit Mathradas as its next CEO, effective February 2, 2026, succeeding long-time chief Mike Burkland as part of a strategic pivot toward AI-driven customer experience innovation. The move reflects the Five9's focus on building unified CX solutions powered by advanced AI, with Mathradas bringing strong experience in AI product development and scaling global operations from his prior leadership at Nintex and Avalara. Burkland, who has guided Five9 through substantial growth, will remain on the board to ensure a smooth transition.

Mathradas’s appointment comes amid a broader restructuring and strategic realignment at Five9, which has included workforce adjustments and a reorientation toward efficiency and market competitiveness. The board conducted a comprehensive search prioritizing candidates with expertise in AI innovation and operational excellence, underscoring the company’s belief that embedding AI deeply into its platform will help drive growth, capture market share, and deliver value to customers and shareholders. Five9 plans to host an investor day in 2026 to further detail its long-term strategy under the new leadership.

Learn more at CX Today.

Zoom has announced its acquisition of BrightHire, an interview-intelligence company founded in 2019, as part of Zoom’s broader evolution from a video-calling service into an AI-driven workplace-platform. The deal expands Zoom’s offering in the hiring workflow by embedding BrightHire’s tools—such as interview planning, scheduling, automated screening, transcription, summarization and coaching—directly into Zoom Workplace, aligning with Zoom’s push to support high-stakes conversations in hiring contexts.

For BrightHire customers, the experience remains intact as a standalone brand within the Zoom ecosystem, but they’ll now benefit from Zoom’s infrastructure, scale and added reliability. For existing Zoom customers, BrightHire’s hiring-focused capabilities will soon appear within the Zoom Workplace platform—creating a more seamless end-to-end talent journey from candidate discovery to onboarding.

Learn more at UC Today.

Zoom Video Communications (Zoom) has entered into a deal to acquire Bonsai, a business-management and client-engagement platform geared primarily toward solopreneurs and small service-based firms. The acquisition reflects Zoom’s strategic aim of expanding beyond its core collaboration and meeting tools by adding capabilities that serve the full client lifecycle—from initial contact, through delivery, to invoicing and payment. Bonsai’s platform simplifies management for small businesses that otherwise juggle multiple tools for contracts, proposals, payments and client communications.

The move also highlights a broader shift in the market toward convergence between collaboration, productivity and customer-experience technologies. By embedding Bonsai’s tools into its broader “Workplace” ecosystem (with items like Zoom Meetings, Chat, AI-assistant, Docs), Zoom aims to give small businesses a more unified, streamlined environment—with AI-driven automations helping with tasks like follow-ups, proposals and scheduling. For CX professionals, the deal underscores how tools for the small business segment are being empowered to deliver near-enterprise quality customer-experience features, but in a simpler, more accessible form. Learn more at CX Today

A new cybersecurity threat has emerged targeting collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams. Attackers can steal authentication tokens stored on a user’s computer, allowing them to impersonate the user and gain access to sensitive information such as chats, emails, and files—without needing passwords or triggering traditional login alerts. This method exploits weaknesses in how authentication data is stored locally, making it possible to bypass many of the standard security controls that organizations rely on to protect cloud communication environments.

For business and IT leaders, the incident underscores the growing risk of identity-based attacks that exploit endpoints instead of networks. Protecting against this type of threat requires a layered security approach that includes stronger endpoint protection, stricter conditional access policies, shorter token lifetimes, and close monitoring of API activity. Employee awareness is also critical—recognizing unusual device behavior or unexpected session changes can help detect compromises early and prevent broader breaches. Learn more at UC Today.

An experiment by Cyber News revealed vulnerabilities in Snapchat’s chatbot, My AI, that underscore the broader risks of relying on chatbots to run customer support independently. Researchers probed the bot with prompts disguised as historical storytelling and succeeded in coaxing it into narrating how incendiary devices were made—despite safeguards against direct queries about weapons. This highlights that even platforms with large user bases and claimed safety features can still be manipulated into producing harmful or misleading content.

Beyond the specific incident, the article argues that customer-facing organizations should treat chatbots as assistants rather than autonomous support agents. It notes other examples of AI models giving false policies or exposing sensitive data, emphasizing how trust, accuracy and oversight matter deeply in customer experience (CX) contexts. The main takeaway is that AI can aid support by handling repetitive or low-risk tasks—but leaving machines alone to deal with complex or high-stakes interactions is still too risky without human oversight. Learn more at CX Today.

On October 20, 2025, the AWS US-East-1 region experienced a significant outage beginning around 03:11 EST, during which internal DNS failures triggered cascading problems across a wide range of services — from social media and messaging apps like Snapchat, Signal and Reddit, to banking systems (e.g., Lloyds Banking Group and Halifax) and smart-home devices such as Ring doorbells. The disruption underscores how deeply intertwined modern digital services have become with a handful of cloud infrastructures, and how quickly user trust can erode when standard digital flows are interrupted.

Beyond the immediate chaos, the outage is a cautionary tale for enterprises about the fragility of underlying infrastructure dependencies. The article highlights that even when the initial failure lies deep in the cloud stack (DNS, region availability zones, mis-configurations), the visible impact for customers is “service unavailable” — which damages reputations even for organisations whose own systems weren’t directly at fault. It further notes that clear, timely communication, awareness of indirect dependencies, and robust disaster-recovery planning are essential in mitigating both the impact and the customer-trust fallout of such outages. Learn more at CX Today.

According to a survey sponsored by Sprinkr and Metric Sherpa, there is a large discrepancy between the view of customer service by business leaders vs. consumers. According to the report, 91% of business leaders believe they deliver consistent customer experiences. However, only 36% of consumers agree. There’s a similarly large gap when it comes to trust and brand alignment: while 86% of leaders believe customers have a valuable amount of trust in their brand, only 44% of consumers feel that way. The study found that 79% of customers frequently feel ignored or forgotten by brands they’ve dealt with, indicating a disconnect not just of perception but of actual experience.

The article highlights the risks this disconnect poses for loyalty, reputation and revenue: 59% of consumers admitted they’d abandon a brand after just one poor service interaction, while only 42% of business leaders accepted that reality. To bridge the gap, the report recommends businesses reassess how they measure customer performance, unify operations across silos, and ensure transparency—especially around AI-use in customer interactions (e.g., 72% of customers expect to be informed when interacting with AI). Learn more at CX Today.