From bankruptcy announcements to the retirement of enterprise social networking services, here are some extracts from popular news stories this week.
Avaya has filed for bankruptcy to wipe off more than 75 percent of its $3.4bn debt.
The Chapter 11 filing in the US brings clarity to an uncertain saga that has rumbled on for months amid Avaya’s stalled move to the cloud.
The vendor characterised the bankruptcy as an “action to accelerate transformation and fortify capital structure”.
As part of the move, Avaya has secured $780m in new financing and plans to restructure its balance sheet.
Alan Masarek, Chief Executive Officer at Avaya, said: “I joined Avaya to help unlock the power of its iconic brand, global customer footprint, massive partner ecosystem, large-scale communications deployments and outstanding team.
“Building on this tremendous foundation, we have made significant progress pioneering an ambitious business model transformation, establishing a competitive product strategy for our subscription and cloud-delivered services and implementing operational efficiencies to better serve the Avaya ecosystem.
“Strengthening Avaya’s capital structure is a critical step to fully realize our transformation, and we are excited to move ahead as a well-capitalized company with one of the strongest balance sheets in our industry that includes substantial cash to invest in our own success.”
Avaya insisted that the service it provides to customers and partners will not be impaired during the process, which it expects to take between 60 and 90 days. It claims its plan is supported by more than 90 percent of its existing secured lenders.
The move will also see Avaya delist from the New York Stock Exchange.
RingCentral’s total revenue grew by 25 percent throughout the fiscal year 2022, with revenue up from $1.59bn in 2021 to $1.99bn in 2022.
The company revealed the figure during its fourth quarter FY 2022 earnings call, in which the company reported a revenue of $525 million, representing 17 percent year-over-year growth.
Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, commented: “We are in a select category of SaaS companies with over $2 billion of recurring revenue, and our Q4 results reflect our ability to deliver healthy growth and increasing profitability as we continue to scale.
“We are executing well in the current environment given our product leadership, which provides customers with the market’s leading UCaaS platform, as well as an integrated CCaaS solution.”
Although with its earnings, RingCentral has also announced in recent days it is extending its strategic partnership with Avaya and that it is also entering a new one with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Both partnerships are designed to help organisations accelerate their journeys to the cloud for communications and collaboration.
AWS
RingCentral’s new Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS will aim to help organisations accelerate their cloud journeys and transform their employee and customer communications.
The partnership is a multi-year agreement that will see AWS offer RingCentral Message Video Phone (MVP) and RingCentral Contact Centre to its customers.
The two companies have stated they will work on delivering vertical solutions with end-to-end cloud migration for businesses in healthcare, financial services, retail, education, and the public sector.
Cisco has reported that revenue for the business branch that houses Webex has fallen by ten percent.
The figures were revealed during the company’s second-quarter earnings call of fiscal year 2023, in which it was reported that Cisco earned $13.6bn in revenue, up seven percent year-over-year.
The decline in collaboration sales has been put down to a drop in meetings and collaboration devices, according to Scott Herren, Chief Financial Officer, Cisco.
He commented: “Internet for the Future was down 1%, driven by declines in optical and Edge. We saw growth in our Cisco 8000 offering and double-digit growth in web scale.
“Collaboration was down 10%, driven by declines in meetings and collaboration devices, slightly offset by growth in contact center.
“End-to-end security was up 7%, driven by our unified threat management and zero trust offerings.”
Q2 FY 2023 is the second quarter running that Cisco has seen a drop in collaboration sales, with a two percent decline in Q1.
Herran declared that the drop in Q1 was again down to a decline in meetings, which he said had been “partially offset by a growth in calling”.
Collaboration revenue has been up and down for Cisco, with the company recently seeing its income fall for four consecutive quarters before it saw a slight growth in Q4 FY 2022.
Despite inconsistent sales, Cisco is still making big moves on its collaboration front, as it has recently showcased a new range of collaboration devices for Microsoft Teams and unveiled a new microphone for hybrid working during ISE 2023.
The company said that its innovations are to help organisations achieve a ‘seamless’ hybrid work experience.
Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft will see the Teams platform run natively on Cisco collaboration devices, with certification expected in March 2023.
Microsoft has revealed several new features for its Viva Engage platform designed for leaders, communicators and knowledge sharing in the hybrid workplace.
The tech giant announced at Inspire 2022 that Viva Engage would be integrated into the Teams and Microsoft 365 platforms to replace Yammer.
Viva Engage allows employees to create and join communities within their organisation, discover and follow topics, and gain access to content from across Microsoft 365.
The latest features added to the Viva Engage platform include ‘the leadership corner’, storyline announcements, ‘ask-me-anything’ events, advanced analytics, and more.
The End of Yammer
Microsoft has confirmed that it will be retiring the Yammer brand over the course of 2023, with the remaining Yammer experiences being rebranded to reflect Viva Engage branding to align with Microsoft Viva.
Yammer has been Microsoft’s social platform for the company’s productivity cloud for over ten years; however, the tech giant feels that community engagement is becoming increasingly important in the evolving world of work.
Essentially, Yammer will continue as Viva Engage, with the next step of the retirement process beginning next month with the rebranding of the Communities app for Outlook and Yammer mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Microsoft has stated that the rebranding will not change the current capabilities, value, or pricing of Yammer for existing Microsoft 365 customers or M365 SKUs.
The tech giant has said it will continue to enhance the Viva Engage experience with new capabilities to boost leadership engagement, authentic expression, events, and knowledge discovery, all of which aim to improve the hybrid working environment.
Twilio has announced that it is set to lay off approximately 17 percent of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan.
According to a company filing with the SEC, Twilio had 8,992 employees in September 2022, so it is estimated that around 1,500 employees are set to depart.
Twilio staff were told about the lay offs in a company-wide email sent from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson.
In the email, Lawson said: “A company optimizes for its environment. For the last 15 years, we ran Twilio for growth, building a tremendous customer base, product set, and revenue base.
“But environments change – and so must we. Now we have to prioritize profit far more than before. We’re exiting the last phase with a great market position, and very strong cash reserves, but unfortunately that’s not enough to get us through the next phase.
“We have to spend less, streamline, and become more efficient. To do that, we’re forming two business units: Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications.
“And today, I’m unfortunately bearing the news that we’re parting ways with approximately 17% of our team.”
As well as the laying off of staff, Twilio is planning a shift to remote work and is aiming to shut down some offices over the coming months.
Lawson has stated that the company intends to maintain a “handful” of global hubs and satellite offices.
Twilio has seen low office utilisation from its employees and aims to redirect some of the cost savings into higher travel budgets to allow employees to see each other more often.
