The week in UC: Top stories you need to know (7.28)

Another Friday is upon us and with us a week FULL of UC and collaboration news! Mergers, market growth, the cloud—oh, my! If it sounds like a lot, it’s because it is a lot. That’s why we’re here to help. Here are the stories from this week you shouldn’t miss:

UC + Company merging |  Mitel Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire ShoreTel

Mitel and ShoreTel officially announced their company merge as of yesterday, July 27th. The merger agreement entails Mitel acquiring 100% of ShoreTel’s shares. This all-cash deal includes their common stock at a price of $7.50 per share with the resulted total enterprise value being around $430M. This is groundbreaking for the telecom industry as ShoreTel shareholders were offered $110M more than yesterday’s final deal 3 years ago.

The goal of this merge? To create a stronger company together as a global market leader in the rapidly growing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market. Current ShoreTel customers have nothing to worry about here–ShoreTel’s current software platform will be enhanced, not axed, and ShoreTel’s hardware selection will expand significantly as Mitel’s hardware will be added to the ShoreTel product set.

UC + Cost dependencies: Infrastructure, endpoints to drive UC tech budget boom in 2018

As organizations progressively invest more in UC infrastructure, endpoints, and staff, UC budgets continue to rise as a result. According to Nemertes Research, an advisory firm, UC budgets are reported to grow by an average of 12.3% in 2018 . The desire to stay relevant in the surging digital world is the main factor in this tech budget escalation.

With the foundation of a survey of over 700 key IT decision-makers, the Nemertes report found organizations successfully implementing digital transformation strategies to be spending 72% more than before on UC and collaboration. This increase in IT spending is based on the aspiration to update their aging infrastructure to carry on enabling digital transformation initiatives.

UC + Market Growth: Unified Communication as a Service Market Research Report

Market Report World finally releases its Global UCaaS Market Research Report 2017-2021 this week. It comprises of comprehensive market analytics and recommendations from tech industry experts as UCaaS expands its significance in the tech industry.

Some of the highlights include system integration and interoperability issues being a primary challenge leading vendors face in the UCaaS industry. Another is the high impact cloud brokerage services for UCaaS are leaving as their momentum grows in the global tech industry.

UC + Call Path | Troubleshoot calls 100x faster (with NEW PRODCUT FEATURES)

 If you’re a vAnalytics user things just got even better for you! We’ve added some new product features to help make your work-life a bit easier. Identify bad calls, gather data, and conduct root call analysis all from your vAnalytics dashboard. Sound good? (See what we did there?)

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