BroadSoft (News - Alert) Reports Strong 2016, 4Q

Unified communications software-as-a-service company BroadSoft in February announced 22 percent revenue growth between 2015 and 2016. The company’s total revenue last year was $341 million. BroadSoft President and CEO Michael Tessler also noted that the company ended 2016 with its first-ever greater than $100 million revenue and billings quarter.

Collaboration Company Buys Trello

Atlassian has acquired Trello for $425 million, bringing together two collaboration companies. Trello has amassed more than 19 million registered users in just five years. The acquisition will expand Atlassian’s leadership in team-based communications. Already the company offers enterprise-grade project tracking (through JIRA), content (through Confluence), and communication (through HipChat) to more than 65,000 organizations in 170 countries.

PGi Snaps Up ReadyTalk (News - Alert)

The unified communications portfolio of PGi is expanding due to its acquisition of ReadyTalk. The acquired is a provider of cloud communications services. It offers audio, video, and web conferencing; self-service solutions; and managed webinar offerings.

CA Gets Automic

CA Technologies has purchased business process and IT automation software company Automic Holding GmbH, which has a strong European presence. The acquisition adds cloud-enabled automation and orchestration capabilities for CA and increases its global reach. With the completion of the transaction, Todd DeLaughter, Automic's CEO, becomes a general manager reporting into CA's Chief Product Officer Ayman Sayed.

ServiceNow (News - Alert) Acquires DxContinuum

DxContinuum has been purchased by ServiceNow in an all-cash transaction.

DxContinuum has developed machine-learning capabilities and data models, which will be helpful as more Internet of Things devices make service requests and those requests need to be categorized, routed, and responded to. Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, at ServiceNow, commented: “Adding DxContinuum to the ServiceNow platform will move much more of the heavy lifting of work processes to machines, freeing people to focus on the highest value work.”

Call Analytics (News - Alert) Outfit Raises $10M

IOVOX has raised $10 million in a Series A round. Octopus Ventures, SF Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank led the round, which consists of a combination of equity and debt financing. The call analytics company offers a service called IOVOX Insights that enables telcos to provide their small and medium customers with information about telephone calls. It shows business how many calls they receive, how many they miss, when and from where the calls are coming, repeat calls, and more.

Investors Seed Sales Contract Firm

Juro, which sells a sales contract authoring and management solution, recently closed $750,000 in seed funding. Investors in the round included Point Nine Capital, Seedcamp, and angel investors Paul Forster and Michael Pennington. The solution is offered via the software-as-a-service model and it leverages machine learning to expedite the contracting process.

John Chambers, Andreesen Join Pindrop Board

Big things are happening at Pindrop. John Chambers, Cisco’s chairman, and Martin Casado, of Andreessen Horowitz, have joined the board of voice security and authentication company Pindrop. Marc Andreessen is also stepping in as a board observer. And Chambers has made an investment in Pindrop. The company doubled its customer base last year, has won the business of Fortune 500 companies, and is seeing success in enterprise call centers that are employing Pindrop to stem their losses from fraud. Pindrop’s Phoneprinting technology identifies, locates, and authenticates phone devices uniquely from the call audio, thereby detecting fraudulent calls and verifying legitimate callers.

Avaya (News - Alert) Adds Zang Office, Spaces

Avaya has introduced new business communications solutions for the small and mid-sized business set. The new offerings, delivered via the company’s Zang business, include Zang Office and Zang Spaces. Zang Office is a customizable cloud-based phone service. The company says this offering provides enterprise-class communications at a small business price. That is, starting at $15.95 a month. Zang Spaces is a meetings-as-a-service offering that brings together sharing, tasks, video, and voice. And it’s integrated with popular calendar solutions. In other recent news from Avaya, the company has launched Avaya Equinox. This solution is based on a mobile-first philosophy and allows communications capabilities to be embedded into applications, business processes, and workflows.

New IPedge Addresses Compliance

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.’s Telecommunication Systems Division has come out with a new release of IPedge. Release 1.7.4 adds applications and features related to security, including a new offline license dongle solution, and encryption of stored voice and fax messages to help organizations achieve HIPAA compliance. The dongle offline licensing option allows customers to license an IPedge or IPedge App Server without the need for public internet access. This is useful in government and hospital scenarios, for example, where public internet access may not be allowed for security reasons.

PGi Launches Mobile Collaboration Exchange

Collaboration company PGi has launched a mobile collaboration exchange  to enable mobile operators to deliver a high-definition audio and video conferencing experience to their customers using existing investments in their LTE and VoLTE network infrastructure. It lets mobile operators directly or through an IPX interconnect customers in conference calls and collaborations across operator networks while preserving HD voice quality with QoS connections.  

Digital Transformation Spending to Reach $1.2T

New data from IDC suggests that worldwide spending on digital transformation projects will be valued at $1.2 trillion in 2017. That’s a 17.8 percent increase from last year. The firm notes that consumerism and new market forces are creating disruption at businesses, which is prompting them to invest in and leverage information and technology to offer best customer experiences and meet internal goals.

Updated Collaboration Tool Addresses Compliance

Dataiku Data Science Studio 4.0 is now available. The new release of this collaboration tool for data science project teams aims to improve the production, development, and management of their efforts. It improves large customer segmentation and scoring, and introduces compliance and regulatory capabilities.