Welcome once again to our weekly roundup of the latest happenings in the UC industry!

This week saw Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Teams now has 250 million monthly active users, as well as providing the first glimpse of what Teams will look like in the new Windows 11 operating system.

But the hottest news from the week was this year’s UC Awards, which announced Poly, Jabra, and Neat among its winners.

Who Won at the UC Awards 2021?

This year’s UC Awards were our biggest and best yet and introduced a host of new categories. UC Today’s Rob Scott was joined by TV tech journalist Kate Russell to announce the winners in what was an extremely competitive event. RingCentral, Poly, and Theta Lake were among the big winners of the night.

Check out the event on-demand and see our full list of winners.

Teams Hits 250 Million MAU

In a recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft boss Nadella revealed that Teams is now seeing 250 million monthly active users (MAU). The vendor also gave numbers for Teams Phones for the first time, which has hit 80 million MAU.

The move to monthly figures marks a change in approach for Microsoft, which had previously reported Teams usage by daily users. Prior to this update, the most recent statistic stood at 145 million daily active users, as of May.

Nadella stated:

“We are nearly 250 million monthly active users as people use Teams each day to communicate, collaborate, and co-author content across work, life, and learning”

“We are leading in the new and growing enterprise phone category. Just like video meetings, chat, and business processes happen in Teams, calls happen in Teams, creating a huge new opportunity.

“We have nearly 80 million monthly active Teams Phones users, with total calls surpassing 1 billion in a single month this quarter, and we’re just getting started.”

Bandwidth Introduces BYOC for RingCentral

Bandwidth’s bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) solution, Duet, will now be available for RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP) platform, which it says will accelerate enterprises’ migration from legacy, on-prem voice to the cloud.

John Bell, Chief Product Officer at Bandwidth, said: “Compounding the unique challenges large organisations face migrating and modernising their communications stack, is the equally important driver to facilitate global communications at scale.

“Bandwidth’s BYOC solution for RingCentral will not only simplify the move to the cloud but also aims to deliver a single pane of glass to global organisations as they look to centralize communications and realize greater operational efficiencies.

“The combination of these two, cloud-native, global powerhouses will make it easier than ever before for our shared customers and prospects in the large enterprise space to modernise their communications”

What’s New in Webex?

This month’s updates to Cisco’s flagship collaboration platform range from zero-trust encryption for meetings, devices, and personal rooms, to extended language support for the Webex Assistant designed for modern devices.

Cisco’s recent acquisition of Slido has resulted in Slido polls available for meetings in Webex. Meetings on the platform can now also avail of a closed captioning solution.

In the messaging space, Webex announced the arrival of Secure B2B FedRAMP support for guest conversations, and an expanded range of security solutions to cover all kinds of B2B discussions.

The Webex Events feature set has also been expanded, with the arrival of an enhanced video-first virtual event offering simple and efficient use.

First Glimpse of Teams in Windows 11

Microsoft has offered a first glance of how Teams will be integrated into the recently announced Windows 11.

An update rolled out via Windows Insiders – which lets a group of users test new features – sees a new chat “flyout” added to the resigned taskbar, giving instant access to Teams chats. The feature is currently focused on consumer users.

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