Communications systems provider Avaya Holdings Corp. today named Alan Masarek its next president and chief executive. Masarek will join the company on Aug. 1, succeeding Jim Chirico, who will also resign his position on the board. Chirico has been with Avaya for 15 years, serving as the company’s CEO for the past five. Previous to that, ...

It has been well-documented on this site and others that customer experience, or CX, is the No. 1 brand differentiator. Every contact center-as-a-service vendor leads with this when talking about reasons why contact centers need to be modernized. My research shows that today, 90% of businesses compete on customer experience compared with only 24% five ...

Ransomware attacks have grown by 80% year-over-year, as they continue to evolve in tactics and scope. The findings come from Zscaler Inc.’s newly released ThreatLabz 2022 Ransomware Report, which uncovered a record number of attacks that have increased both in volume and the cost of damages. This data certainly jibes with my own research that ...

Nvidia Inc. is positioning its open DOCA software framework as the fastest and easiest way to speed up the development and performance of data processing unit applications. DOCA is a software development kit for Nvidia BlueField DPUs (pictured). For those not familiar with BlueField, it provides data center infrastructure-on-a-chip, optimized for high-performance enterprise and cloud computing. Because DOCA ...

Business communications service provider Avaya Inc. today reported disappointing second-quarter earnings and provided weak guidance for the third quarter, but there’s evidence that its shift to the cloud is gaining momentum. Revenue fell 2% from a year ago, to $716 million, missing a consensus estimate by $21.6 million. Profit before certain costs was $51 million, ...

There should be no doubt that hybrid work is here to stay. We are more than two years since the work-from-home period of the pandemic began and businesses have been all over the map with respect to what the return to work looks like. Earlier this year, I was part of UC Today’s UC Summit ...

The past two years have brought a significant amount of societal change, including the way we work. This shift in lifestyle to one that is largely digital also brought about a surge in cyberattacks, which rose in both frequency and complexity last year, with several threats causing concern among industry experts into 2022. The cyberattacks ...

Arista Networks Inc. announced today that it’s embedding network detection and response or NDR capabilities into its network switches. With an upgrade to EOS, Arista’s operating system, the 720XP series of switches will have NDR baked into it. The NDR capabilities, which Arista gained through its recent Awake Security acquisition, will give organizations greater visibility, automated ...

F5 Inc., a leader in application delivery controllers, today announced its new software-as-a-service Distributed Cloud Services platform. The new solution is the coming together of several acquisitions, including Volterra and Shape Security. Network functions include cloud load balancing, multicloud networking, cloud-native edge computing services and a Kubernetes gateway. Security services comprise F5’s new Distributed Cloud ...

Cisco Systems Inc. just released one of its largest-ever cybersecurity studies, providing a detailed view into the top five security practices proven to be most effective for organizations. Cisco claims that those adopting the top practices can propel their security programs ahead of 79% of other organizations. “Security Outcomes Study Volume 2” not only explores key ...