From a fresh Salesforce acquisition to a lightweight version of Amazon Connect for SMBs, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Salesforce to Acquire Bluebirds, Continues to ‘Agentify’ the Enterprise
Salesforce has agreed to snap up Bluebirds, the presales prospecting platform provider.
Its platform comprises out-of-the-box targeting, data enrichment, and signal scoring tools.
There is also a prospecting agent that takes intelligence from these tools and prospects on behalf of sales reps.
Soon, Salesforce will make the agent available on Sales Cloud and Agentforce.
In doing so, the CRM leader aims to reduce busywork for sales reps and help them spend more time selling and closing.
Kris Billmaier, EVP & GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce, added:
Bluebirds’ technology will help us deliver smarter, AI-powered prospecting that makes sellers more productive from day one, right inside the Salesforce platform.
While the prospecting agent may attract most attention, Bluebirds’ tech centers around its targeting engine. That engine combines LinkedIn signals with first-party data, including warm contacts from a CRM and de-anonymized web traffic (Read more…).
AWS Pushes a Lightweight Version of Amazon Connect for SMBs
AWS has demoed a lite communications solution for smaller businesses.
The solution, built by AWS’s partner Digiclarity, is essentially a boiled-down, tailored, and augmented version of Amazon Connect.
In its promotion, AWS highlights how service providers and telcos can resell the offering to the underserved small business market.
Those businesses can be as small as one-to-nine employees, with Digiclarity targeting service-based businesses, such as electricians, painters, and plumbers.
Such companies usually find enterprise tech, like Amazon Connect, too complex or expensive. However, the brandable solution – going under the banner “Amazon Connect-powered SMB communications as a service” – is simplified to meet their needs.
Jason Keel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at DigiClarity, introduced the solution on the AWS YouTube channel. He said:
We wanted to create a platform that could give small business owners a complete contact center, customer management system, and invoicing and billing, in less than five minutes.
SMBs of up to 500 employees can test the solution at no cost, with Digiclarity offering a free seven-day trial (Read more…).
Pegasystems Promises “Industry-First” Customer Self-Service Capabilities with Its Latest Launch
Pegasystems has pledged to deliver “industry first” customer self-service capabilities within its new Pega Self-Service Agent.
The offering combines the three pillars of Pega’s portfolio: Pega Blueprint, Pega Predictable AI, and Center-Out agentic architecture.
The Agent allows users to turn enterprise workflows traditionally followed by customer service teams into “interactive self-service experiences”.
In doing so, it automates complex requests while maintaining “full visibility, control, and compliance”.
With the release, Pega is looking to distance itself from what it sees as the multitude of subpar self-service solutions currently clogging up the industry.
The company describes these current tools as “basic chatbots” that can only handle rudimentary requests and “introduce increased unpredictability and risk.”
Pega CTO, Don Schuerman, elaborated on this point, stating:
While the market buzzes with agentic AI hype, enterprises still struggle to find responsible solutions that deliver the high caliber of service customers have come to expect.
Read on to find out more about Pega’s three pillars.
RingCentral Recommits to NiCE, Explains Where Its Own CCaaS Solution Fits
RingCentral and NiCE have extended their agreement to market the RingCentral Contact Center.
The RingCentral Contact Center is a dressed-up version of NiCE CXone Mpower, which features a tight integration with RingEX, RingCentral’s collaborations platform.
By combining these two technologies, businesses can converge CCaaS and UCaaS solutions that lead their respective Gartner Magic Quadrants.
In doing so, they can create a single, interoperable communications environment.
The relationship has lasted ten years and proved fruitful for both vendors. Now, Vladimir Shmunis, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of RingCentral, shared his excitement at prolonging the deal.
During the company’s latest earnings call, Shmunis stated:
We look forward to working with a NiCE team offering a best-in-class, integrated AI-powered cloud telephony and contact center suite that is the ideal choice for enterprises with complex and advanced use cases.
The extension will be music to the ears of many existing RingCentral Contact Center customers. After all, rumors of a soured relationship had spread across the industry (Read more…).
