As we cruise into the (hopefully sunny) long weekend, your friends at UC Today have once again gathered the hottest news from around the UC industry for your reading enjoyment.

This week was a mixed one for Microsoft Teams; it celebrated hitting a cool 145 million daily active users, while also experiencing an outage. Elsewhere, RingCentral released a whole host of video updates, Google Workspace drove its cloud growth and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg spoke with us about scaling BlueJeans.

Microsoft Teams Hits Record Number of Daily Users

Teams now boasts 145 million daily active users, according to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. This is the first update on Teams users since the tech titan revealed that it had 115 million active daily Teams users in October. The figure stood at just over 32 million before the pandemic.

“In markets where employees have returned to the workplace, including Australia, China, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, we have seen usage continue to grow,” he said.

“We are accelerating our innovation, adding over 300 features over the past year, including more than 100 new capabilities so far in 2021.″

Workspace Drives Google Cloud Growth

In a quarterly earnings call this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted its collaboration suite Workspace as a driving factor in its cloud growth, which surpassed $4bn in Q1.

The unit, which also houses Google Cloud Platform, saw sales rise 46 per cent year on year to $4.05bn, while losses narrowed from $1.7bn to $974m. 

Workspace – formerly known as G Suite – was described by Pichai as the third of three components driving cloud growth.

“We continue to deliver helpful innovations to enable hybrid work with Google Workspace,” he stated. 

“This includes digital tools for front-line workers like nurses and retail store workers, as well as new security offerings. These innovations have helped grow our revenue per seat and the number of seats in the last quarter.”

RingCentral Releases Host of New Video Updates

RingCentral has released a bunch of new features for its RingCentral Video platform, including presenter overlay, video virtual backgrounds, breakout rooms and picture-in-picture mode.

Its chat function has also been refreshed, including allowing users to create personal folders that group teams and conversations together. The upgrades now also allow admins to invite people from external organisations into the RingCentral system.

“How we work is changing and the capabilities we need to have to communicate and collaborate will evolve,” stated Nat Natarajan, EVP of products and engineering at RingCentral.

“We are rapidly delivering new capabilities of RingCentral Video that not only make video meetings more enjoyable and more effective but combine video with team messaging so people can get more done work more effectively before, during, and after their meetings”

Microsoft Teams Recovers From Outage

In the same week that saw it celebrate revenues rising to $41.7bn for its quarter ending 31 March, Microsoft Teams also experienced a global outage.

The outage struck at 11.30am BST on Tuesday, with Microsoft initially reporting that users in Europe and Africa were affected. It later admitted that users around the world were being affected by the disruption.

By 2pm it said it had resolved the issue which had affected desktop apps and web clients. This outage is the second to strike Microsoft in as many months.

BlueJeans Expected To Scale

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg opened up on an earnings call about its plans for BlueJeans, which it acquired last April.

Verizon plans to scale and integrate the meetings platform with its wider UCaaS offering.

“On the BlueJeans and collaboration tools, we are integrating that every day here in new settings, with new partners all the time, because this is a great asset and we are scaling it right now,” he stated.

“So that feels really good, and we still have the whole 5G era and the mobile edge compute area which is going to need video conferencing or communication services”

“There is a lot more to be done there.”

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