Zoomtopia and Smartsheet ENGAGE highlights, 1E acquires Exporise and more....

Hello everyone,

Happy Saturday, and welcome to another edition of the weekly Digital Workplace and Future of Work newsletter.

As I mentioned in my previous few editions, this is the events season, and different technology providers announce a flurry of new features, capabilities, partnerships, etc. In this edition, too, I'll cover such major announcements. So, let's dive in!

End-user technology

1E acquires Exporise

1E announced the acquisition of Exporise. More details here:

1E, a strong Leader in the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution market, further enhances its capabilities. It already has robust features to support diverse areas such as device refresh, UEM and software license usage. (More details in my upcoming report) This acquisition enhances its capabilities for app monitoring, specifically UCaaS monitoring, network and macOS monitoring and observability. As observability and visibility are the most popular use cases for DEX today, it significantly enhances its market positioning.

Atera and GoTo's new partnership

Atera and GoTo announced a new partnership related to their MDM and RMM capabilities. More details here:

Atera's capabilities, from their own website, cover all the required peripheral components of modern IT management such as patch management, remote management etc. What is interesting is the partnership focus on Miradore (although GoTo has stopped using this brand name anymore!), and not GoTo's own remote support and screen share solutions. Atera has partnerships with GoTo's direct competitors in this space. The partnership will definitely help both Atera and GoTo and their joint customers with expanded reach.

Riverbed and Intel partner to combine powerful insights

Riverbed Technology announced that it has a new partnership with 英特尔 with which it can provide comprehensive insights around observability. More details here:

This is a significant enhancement that extends Riverbed's network observability and monitoring capabilities to include WiFi connectivity. Since this includes Thunderbolt technology as well, Riverbed, with its Unified Observability solution, can now manage a larger set of endpoints using the Thunderbolt cables. This strengthens Riverbed's capabilities within the DEX space.

Hexnode signs new distributor for South Africa

Hexnode announced a new distribution partner in South Africa. More details here:

Recently, Hexnode signed up new partners to expand its market presence in India. Now, with this new partnership, Hexnode highlights its strategy to expand in less crowded and competitive niche markets.

Managed Workplace Services

Bechtle acquires Qolcom

Bechtle announced that it has acquired Qolcom More details here:

Bechtle itself is a very strong Euopean workplace service provider with strong credentials in the Microsoft Ecosystem. It had won the ISG Star of Excellence CX Star Performer award this year for receiving the highest customer experience score for its Microsoft ecosystem managed services. This move further strengthens its position in the local UK market.

Connected and Collaborative Work

Zoomtopia 2024 and Zoom's AI Companion 2.0

Zoom had its annual Zoomtopia event this week, where it announced multiple updates. You can catch them all here:

There are so many things that are exciting! Zoom AI Companion (AIC) can actually get data from AI agents from other enterprise applications such as ServiceNow, Workday, etc. Does it simplify the user experience with respect to the increasing number of copilots and AI agents, or does it complicate things? Time will tell. I particularly liked the Zoom Tasks features, which bring Zoom one more step closer to enhancing its portfolio attractiveness for the Connected and Collaborative Work domain. Another exciting feature introduced is even smarter meeting summarizing, which makes me wonder, with all those AI agents, will we really need a meeting? Zoom is offering to customize AIC for specific industries as well! Zoom is also bringing AI to Workvivo, although the applications I saw showcased simple use cases.

RingCentral gets license to provide UCaaS and CCaaS PAN India

RingCentral announced that it has received the required regulatory approvals for PAN India UCaaS and CCaaS deployment. More details here:

I covered in this newsletter few months ago when RingCentral got the initial approvals. India is a huge market and RingCentral has the first mover advantage here.

Smartsheet ENGAGE 2024

Smartsheet in its annual ENGAGE event showcased many innovative new features. You can catch them all here:

File Libraries and Collections are great features and strengthen Smartsheet's capabilities. As I have said multiple times, the boundaries between work management and work itself are getting blurred. Smartsheet's innovations hint at these developments. I have also always appreciated Smartsheet's focus on asynchronous communications, which enhances users' review experience with this feature.

Sneak peek into ISG's upcoming report on Connected and Collaborative Work solutions

ISG (Information Services Group) is soon going to release its new report on Connected and Collaborative Work solutions, written by yours truly. Here's a sneak peek:

In the end, I want to remind you that I will be in Bellevue next week. If anyone is nearby and wants to meet, just drop in a message.

That's all for the week, folks. Please share your feedback and thoughts in the comments below. Feel free to share it with anyone you think would be interested in the content. Thank you very much for your consistent support.

Thanks

-M