CCaaS 2021: The Giants are Coming - Insider Lite | TalkingPointz

There’s an analyst creed that thou shalt not comment on other analysts’ work. It’s silly - there’s some tremendously insightful people covering this space.

Gartner published three CCaaS reports this month, including the Magic Quadrant. This is extensive work that I cannot replicate, so instead I study the MQ (many of them) thoroughly. They are chock-full-of-information. My mind races when I read them.

MQs are highly condensed. That’s part of their style, and this leaves room to explore. In my research note, I extrapolate their findings with my own observations. I try to figure out the surprises and address unanswered questions. For example, they didn’t directly address when UC and CC are best combined and best obtained separately.

They also didn’t address the changing landscape, and one of my takeaways is that the market cap of the CCaaS provider will begetting a lot bigger – exponentially bigger.

Today, Amazon disproportionately skews the combined market cap of the firms on the MQ, but hold on to your hat. Zoom just announced it’s coming, and Td just got a $10B valuation. I suspect Microsoft, Salesforce, and Twilio are in queue too. We also need to make room for the prem-based CC vendors, more UCaaS and CCaaS providers, and expansion from various adjacencies too (such as WEM).

The report is available here. Subscribers only, but it’s easy to become one.

The August episodes got crunched.

The obvious WFH conversation isn’t happening because climate change is political. #[email protected]

Insider reports are a subscription service from TalkingPointz. This is content from the July Report. August report publishes next week!

Kaseya and Security: The very IT firms hired to protect company data inadvertently provided a back door for a major “supply chain” ransomware attack this month. It hits close to home as Kaseya is used by many providers that offer UCC solutions. 

Victims of the attack span 17 countries. It even impacted companies that had nothing to do with Kaseya. For example, Swedish supermarket chain Coop shut down hundreds of stores because its registers were managed by a company that’s a Kaseya customer. 

We are coming to an uncomfortable conclusion: There’s simply no way to secure connected devices. The internet was great while it lasted. This conclusion became even more evident as we learned about the Pegasus attacks. This is very specialized (and expensive) commercially developed malware:

“Pegasus can collect emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact lists, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories…The spyware can activate cameras or microphones to capture fresh images and recordings.” It can do all that without any involvement from the iPhone user in what’s known as a zero-click attack.

I write about hacks every month. The simple conclusion is that tech companies are not doing enough to protect customers from unwanted intrusions. There are plenty of solutions we need to tap into, including: E2EE and provider liabilities.

We recorded an episode for this week. It was on #EC24, but evidently the program is “fluid” and our information was out of date. The jest was that ZK and I will be at EC21 and we are looking forward to some great content by some great presenters by some wonderful vendors and colleagues. The only thing we seem to know for certain is it will be at the Gaylord Palms.

ZK and I will be on the Locknote - the last session on the last day. It’s the only unrehearsed session and it has no slides!