First unified communications provider to both receive a license and obtain key regulatory verifications to operate in India by Department of Telecommunications (DOT)

RingCentral, a leading provider of AI-powered global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced it is the first global cloud provider to offer fully compliant cloud phone services in India. RingCentral passed key regulatory verifications by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) India and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), enabling multinational organizations with a presence in India to access cloud phone capabilities for streamlined communication with customers, partners, and employees.

“India is a key strategic market for us, and adding this country as our 46th country for global availability of RingCentral MVP is an important milestone,” said Mo Katibeh, President and COO of RingCentral. “RingCentral is the first cloud UC vendor to have the license and authorization from the Department of Telecommunications India to operate in India. We’re grateful to the DOT and to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India for their support of this launch.”

Unlocking access to a major economic hub

Gartner estimates IT communications services spending in India to reach $24.7B in 2023. As more global corporations turn to India to grow satellite offices and develop technology hubs, they need fully compliant, enterprise-grade solutions to ensure business continuity and seamless communications. While non-compliant global cloud telephony solutions are technically available in India, organizations using these services run the risk of audits, which can shut services down with little-to-no notice.

“India is the fastest-growing major economy in the world, with an impressive 5.5% average gross domestic product growth over the last 10 years,” said Krishna Baidya, Senior Director ICT Practice – Asia-Pacific at Frost & Sullivan. “Being the first U.S. based cloud telephony provider in the country and a growing corporate acceptance for hybrid work, RingCentral has a huge opportunity as it brings its leading cloud solutions to this growing market.”

Building out a world-class telecommunications network in India

After receiving its Unified License from the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) 18 months ago, RingCentral actively worked on completing the buildout of its domestic infrastructure in India. During this phase, RingCentral passed rigorous government inspections, and cleared stringent security standards to deliver its world-class telephony services to India – a first among all U.S. cloud telephony providers.

“We are very thankful to the DOT and TRAI for their fair application of stringent telecommunications rules and regulations enabling RingCentral to deploy our robust solutions for communications and collaboration needs of businesses in India,” said Rajeev Singh Rathore, Vice President, Cloud Operations at RingCentral India. “As a pioneer in delivering enterprise-grade cloud communications solutions for over two decades, RingCentral can drive modern cloud communications for businesses of all sizes, across every industry and employee type for India.”

RingCentral is currently available in over 45 countries and supports 18 languages, providing the flexibility and global reach that multinational enterprises need. This new offering will facilitate the deployment of cloud solutions for global organizations with a presence in India.

The long-term relationship will offer additional cutting edge, transparent and privacy-compliant campaign measurement and attribution solutions to DIRECTV Advertising customers

DIRECTV Advertising, a pioneer in the converged addressable space, announces a partnership with 605, a global leader in television and cross-platform measurement, planning, analytics and attribution.

By tapping into 605’s sophisticated measurement platform and rich data partnerships, DIRECTV Advertising will continue to build on its legacy of delivering best-in-class audience-based, data-enabled media solutions. Expanding on DIRECTV’s direct-to-consumer relationships and deterministic first-party data, and 605’s industry leading methodology, the companies will provide customers with more visibility on lower funnel metrics including sales lift, website activity, geo-location visitation and more.

“The combination of DIRECTV’s market-leading addressable TV product with 605’s analytical rigor will create a compelling offering for brands who increasingly want meaningful and timely metrics on the performance of their spend,” said Tom Keaveney, President of 605. “We anticipate this will make advanced measurement and attribution accessible to an even greater number of DIRECTV brands.”

“DIRECTV Advertising is always driving new opportunities to provide innovative and differentiated attribution solutions to our customers,” said Amy Leifer, Chief Advertising Sales Officer of DIRECTV. “This partnership will unlock valuable insights and showcase how addressable campaigns can deliver real results for marketers and brands.”

Identity Application Enables Joint Customers to Improve Data Hygiene Insights and Data Clean Room Collaborations Without Data Leaving the Client’s Snowflake Account

TransUnion NYSE: TRU today announced at Snowflake’s annual user Snowflake Summit 2023, the launch of the TruAudience transfer-less Identity Resolution app on Snowflake Marketplace. TransUnion’s new Snowflake Native App enables marketers to execute privacy-enhanced identity resolution and data collaboration use cases in the Snowflake Media Data Cloud. The app is now publicly available for use by clients of TransUnion’s TruAudience marketing solutions and Snowflake. 

 “TransUnion is leaning in and allowing Snowflake to reduce security, privacy, and governance concerns, so they can focus on helping the thousands of customers on Snowflake Marketplace unlock mission critical consumer insights leveraging the full power of their advanced identity resolution capabilities in the Snowflake Media Data Cloud,” said Chris Child, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake.  “The Snowflake Native App Framework enables TransUnion to bring their apps directly to their customer’s data to drive value.” 

The Identity Resolution app connects disparate offline and online data while enriching records with demographics by directly leveraging the TruAudience identity graph. The app’s built-in machine learning capabilities for resolution improve the matching of records and the rate of appending new data information.

As a result, marketers can now supercharge actionable consumer insights to power audience segmentation, campaign strategy, and consistent marketing experiences across channels, with no transfers of data outside the Snowflake environment. Previously, these advanced identity resolution capabilities required data movement between marketers’ existing platforms and partners, leading to hurdles and time passing information security, data governance, and legal processes. 

“We’re thrilled to join Snowflake as we usher in a new era of data strategy and collaboration by bringing our advanced identity resolution capabilities to joint customers, wherever their data and marketing technology lives,” said Ryan Engle, VP of Identity Solutions and Platform Integrations at TransUnion. “We expect this to transform our clients’ ability to not only improve their consumer data quality, but also collaborate with partners without sharing sensitive customer information. This can be a win-win for all parties involved.” 

Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, announced that the Snowflake Native App Framework (public preview on AWS) is now available for developers to build and test apps natively in the Data Cloud with additional distribution and monetization capabilities in public preview soon. Snowflake Native Apps usher in a new era of data collaboration, enabling developers with the tools needed to create robust apps quickly with Snowflake's high availability and auto-scalability, all the while reducing security and procurement hurdles for customers because the apps run directly within the customers’ Snowflake accounts.

Snowflake Marketplace already has over 25 new Snowflake Native Apps available today, and over one hundred providers are currently developing apps that span multiple industries and use cases. TransUnion is one of the leading organizations building in the Data Cloud, with a Snowflake Native App readily available to easily bring unique insights to end users and enable them to unlock value with just a few clicks on Snowflake Marketplace. By being Powered by Snowflake, TransUnion is able to impact the community by distributing its app to thousands of Snowflake customers, without these customers having to move or expose their data.

Comcast Awards $75,000 Grant for Tallahassee Program to Drive Digital Adoption

In partnership with Comcast, Tallahassee community leaders today announced the creation of a new program to help bridge the digital divide, promote digital equity and inclusion, and drive digital adoption in Tallahassee’s southside neighborhoods, where many residents are not subscribed to home internet services.

The Rotary Club of Tallahassee Southside, the Greater Apalachee Ridges Estates Neighborhood Association, Leon County Schools and Comcast hosted the Inaugural Community Digital Equity Forum today at Fairview Middle School for about 200 residents, students and community advocates.

Comcast announced it will award a $75,000 grant to the Rotary Club and the Neighborhood Association, who will work with the school district and other community organizations to launch a Digital Navigators program in Leon County.

Digital Navigators are specially trained advocates who help their neighbors get online, develop digital skills and connect them to available resources.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed that Digital Navigators are critical to driving digital adoption in unconnected communities and reducing socioeconomic inequalities by helping more people directly access the Internet.

The study surveyed 1,500 individuals across the country who received support from a Digital Navigator. With the support of these digital case workers:

• More than 65 percent of survey respondents said they obtained Internet access or a computer or tablet at home; among Hispanic and Black Americans, this increased to 72 percent.
• More than 85 percent of all respondents said they used the Internet more frequently.
• Almost half surveyed obtained better healthcare, and 40 percent received support with basic needs like food, rent, and housing.
• 1 in 3 found a new job or earned a higher income.

“The positive impact Digital Navigators have is astounding. Their success proves that to close the digital divide we need to connect with people in person to grow their comfort and confidence with technology and going online,” said Bret Perkins, Comcast Senior Vice President of External & Government Affairs. “By funding the creation of a Digital Navigators program with our dedicated community partners, we are one step closer to closing the digital divide in Tallahassee and making sure that everyone here has the access and skills needed to take advantage of the Internet’s vast resources.”

According to the National Skills Coalition, 92% of jobs require digital skills yet nearly one-third of U.S. workers do not have foundational digital skills — disproportionally impacting low-income communities and people of color.

The Rotary Club, Neighborhood Association, Leon County Schools and additional supporting partners will launch #TallahasseeConnects, a nine-month campaign to train and dispatch Digital Navigators to help Southside residents sign up for free or low-cost in-home internet services, including the federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and Comcast’s Internet Essentials program.

Digital Navigators will also encourage residents to undergo digital skills training at the Apalachee Ridge Estates Technology & Learning Center, which has been a Comcast Lift Zone since May 2021. Lift Zones are WiFi connected spaces at the facilities of Comcast community partners where residents and students can get online.

“We are thrilled about expanding our partnership with Comcast today,” said Christic Henry, President of the Greater Apalachee Ridge Estates Neighborhood Association. “Not only did we launch our Tallahassee Connected campaign, but the Inaugural Digital Equity Forum allowed community stakeholders and residents to gather and speak openly about the challenges of not being connected and how we can work together to resolve digital inequities.”

Updates enrich Unified API Protection solution with advanced testing capabilities and fraud prevention

Cequence Security, the leader in API Protection, today announced new updates to the Unified API Protection (UAP) platform that strengthen customers’ ability to discover, manage risk and protect APIs. With the latest capabilities, organizations can rapidly deploy API Security Testing with built-in generative AI automation, protect users from online fraud and operationalize security findings with low-code/no-code workflows.

“We are always exploring ways to further automate and improve our UAP solution and help our customers consolidate the tools required to stay ahead of the threat actors,” said Ameya Talwalkar, founder and CEO. “The updates to our platform continue to set us apart from other point solution vendors in the API security space as we are providing our customers with the only integrated best-of-suite approach to discover, comply, test and protect their APIs.”

“Today, we are also excited to share we are the first API security vendor to take advantage of the game-changing Generative AI and no-code security automation within our UAP solution to better protect users from online fraud and simplify security findings,” continued Talwalkar.

Enhance API Security Testing with Generative AI

With the enormous potential of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard, Cequence is one of the first cybersecurity companies and the first API Protection company to leverage its power to protect data and users from bad actors. Cequence has added several new capabilities to API Security Testing, including Test Plan generation using a new feature called Intelligent Mode that helps automate the generation of API Security Test Plans using plain English, extending the low-code/no-code approach to test case generation. Cequence UAP's Intelligent Mode automatically associates the appropriate APIs with the right test cases, given the functionality of that API. This not only drastically reduces the time needed to create a test plan to minutes, as compared to months with other solutions, it also ensures consistent experience across a customer's entire applications and environments.

Several other enhancements include detailed insights and remediation workflows into test failures. The test catalog now has test cases for the latest OWASP API Top 10 2023. Cequence also empowers InfoSec teams to run API tests outside of CI/CD pipelines, and instead, point attack test suites directly against staging or even production servers.

New Fraud Prevention Capabilities

To enable organizations to protect their APIs from online fraud, Cequence has introduced the Fraud Prevention module in API Spartan. The new module enables organizations to protect their end-customers from online fraud and instantly take action, including blocking transactions and generating enterprise-grade notifications to relevant teams.

Protecting applications and users against online fraud complements the existing capabilities of Cequence to detect and block business logic abuse, account takeover (ATO) attempts, common OWASP API Top 10 security risks and automated malicious traffic.

Operationalize API Protection with Low-Code/No-Code Security Automation

Cequence has introduced out-of-the-box integrations with over 300 third-party apps, including ServiceNow, PagerDuty, JIRA and Slack. Using off-the-shelf connections to these apps, security analysts can ensure security risks or threats are routed promptly to their business teams for remediation.

Security analysts can use a low-code/no-code approach within Cequence to implement the equivalent of an API Security Orchestration and Response (SOAR) workflow, wiring together multiple third-party connections to achieve their desired outcomes. Using this approach, analysts can operationalize workflows that promptly remediate critical API security risks, such as the discovery of shadow APIs that have access to sensitive data and new security risks of weak authentication or non-conformance to OpenAPI specifications in newly built pre-production CI/CD pipelines.

Enhanced Visibility of External Facing APIs with API Spyder

New enhancements to API Spyder enable customers to easily identify APIs that are externally accessible, but not entirely protected by Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) infrastructure. Additionally, this approach offers a seamless complement to API Sentinel's deep insights into runtime API inventory and compliance checking using the OWASP API Security Top 10 and other custom risk categories.

With the latest Unified API Protection platform updates, organizations can now protect their users from online fraud, operationalize security findings with low-code/no-code API SOAR-like workflows and rapidly deploy API Security Testing with built-in Generative AI automation. These capabilities continue to set Cequence apart from other point API security, bot management, anti-fraud and WAF vendors by having the industry’s first and only Unified API Protection platform that covers the entire API lifecycle. With UAP, customers can discover with API Spyder, comply with API Sentinel and protect with API Spartan.

Expanded set of transformation, quality and analytics solutions provide Snowflake customers a comprehensive approach to delivering trusted data across the enterprise for impact

With the recent acquisition of Talend^® and launch of Qlik Cloud^® data transformation services, Qlik^® today announced at Snowflake’s annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023, that it has significantly expanded its platform to deliver a comprehensive best-in-class approach to accessing, transforming and delivering trusted quality data for analysis and action into Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

“As customers scale with Snowflake, they want to streamline the process of getting analytics-ready and trusted data,” said Itamar Ankorion, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Qlik. “Qlik Cloud Data Integration’s new Data Transformation Services makes it easier to leverage push-down SQL and deliver valuable data that’s ready for immediate use. And with Talend’s leading quality and governance solutions, customers can further ensure they have trusted data to create a true end-to-end data integration and analytics strategy with Snowflake.”

Data fragmentation and the growing volume of data sources are putting increased focus and importance on the ability to continuously organize, transform and cost effectively deliver real-time data through the cloud. The combination of Qlik’s data integration and analytics solutions, alongside Talend’s hybrid-cloud approach to data connectivity and data quality, is a unique end-to-end portfolio of solutions that help Snowflake customers find, transform, trust and analyze their data at scale. This comprehensive platform helps customers with:

Data Integration: Customers need easier and cost-effective solutions to ingesting and immediately transforming the data they land in Snowflake. Qlik’s Connector Factory will expand access and delivery of data with initial delivery of connectors to the 20 most popular enterprise applications including NetSuite, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Salesforce, Cerner, OSIsoft, SAP Ariba and HubSpot. Qlik’s recently launched Data Transformation Services through Qlik Cloud Data Integration enables customers to transform ingested data directly in Snowflake and maintain history as part of broader transformation capabilities. And Qlik’s recent acquisition of Elite Snowflake Partner Talend, including Stitch and its 150+ connectors, gives customers increased flexibility and choice in how they can leverage Qlik solutions to drive more data to Snowflake.

Data Quality and Governance: Increasing trust in data is vital to driving automations, analytics and generative AI use cases. Talend’s Native Trust Scoreä and data quality rules are computed inside Snowflake, leveraging Snowpark User Defined Functions (UDFs) to push down for faster and more efficient processing. Talend’s data profiler, powered by machine learning, does a semantic analysis of the data, builds the metadata associated with the data, and checks for many different aspects of the data such as validity, completeness and uniqueness. Utilizing Talend in Snowflake UDF and Snowpark natively, customers more easily and quickly get healthier data for overall business well-being.

Trusted Data for Any Use Case: Customers have diverse needs ranging from board level reporting to specific data science and generative AI projects. Trusted data is critical across every industry, from manufacturing to supply chain and finance. Between Qlik and Talend there are a wide range of customers already leveraging solutions with Snowflake, including customers like ABB, Siemens and HARMAN. Qlik also recently took part in the launch of Snowflake’s Manufacturing Data Cloud, bringing unique SAP related expertise and accelerators to help manufacturers unlock the value of their critical data and collaborate with their partners, suppliers and customers in a secure and scalable way.

“Customers looking to modernize their data at scale have increasing needs for cost effective ways to efficiently transform, manage and govern their data in the cloud,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “Qlik’s existing and new solutions, along with their newly acquired Talend capabilities, will help customers more easily manage their data transformation needs and increase the value of their data in Snowflake.”

The company unveils Sage AI by Braze to power new capabilities that help marketers quickly bring creative brilliance to life with automation, personalization, and predictive capabilities

Braze, the comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today announced updates to its existing artificial intelligence capabilities, now collectively named Sage AI by Braze. In its next evolution, Sage AI by Braze consists of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities that are deeply integrated into the Braze platform, data flows and execution stack to power better, faster and more effective outcomes from engagement across the user journey.

“Launching Sage AI by Braze represents a significant leap forward in empowering marketers to unlock their creative potential, and drive better outcomes faster,” said Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer for Braze. “Technology innovation has been in our DNA from the earliest days, and Braze has built AI capabilities for our customers for almost a decade. By automating complex tasks and providing powerful predictive capabilities, our advanced AI capabilities enable marketers to focus on the strategic aspects of their roles and deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

Sage AI by Braze is uniquely positioned to help marketers achieve better business outcomes with:

• Comprehensive cross-channel data flows that power extensive first-party inputs into AI decisioning while unlocking optimization and personalization across many channels.
• Real-time ingestion and execution of customer behavior, preference, and attribute data that powers AI to make faster, more accurate decisions.
• Easily accessible and flexible experimentation that opens up more opportunities for AI optimization and personalization at every step of the customers journey.

Now more than ever, marketers are under immense pressure to deliver strong business results quickly with limited resources, while still building meaningful relationships with customers at scale. According to IDC, by 2026, 45% of the Global 2000 companies will leverage AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upselling potential.*

The Sage AI by Braze launch includes:

• Intelligent insights to drive hyper-personalized experiences: As consumers increasingly expect personalized experiences from brands, Braze has launched a beta version of AI Recommendation engine that uses ML to match relevant items from Braze Catalogs with the customers most likely to buy them. This feature can create hyper-personalized experiences with the potential to increase revenue and boost brand loyalty.
• Automation generative AI features to increase efficiency and creativity: Braze is unveiling an AI Content QA tool that leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology to check messages for tone, structure, grammar, and appropriate language before sending. Braze also plans to add generative AI into its Query Builder and SQL Segment Extension tools, which aims to empower teams to easily transform natural language prompts into powerful reports and audience segments.
• Flexible experimentation tools to optimize customer journeys: Braze is bringing more optimization and automation directly into Canvas Flow, its no-code journey orchestration tool, with the Winning Path feature. Winning Path allows Braze users to run experiments throughout a customer journey and use ML statistical models to automatically send customers down the paths with the best performance. In addition to Winning Path, Braze plans to introduce a Personalized Path feature that will use predictive modeling to recommend the best path for each individual user, based on their attributes, preferences and behaviors. Braze is also planning an A/B Test Prediction feature that is intended to employ predictive analytics to forecast the best campaign strategy and optimize campaigns in record time.

These features will complement robust existing AI/ML capabilities in Braze, which includes predictive identification and targeting of customers most likely to churn, make purchases, and perform other events. Braze customers currently leverage Intelligent Timing, Selection, and Channel to help optimize message send time, channel selection, and conversions, and generative AI capabilities rapidly generate campaign copy and images. “I felt like I always used the same words, the same expressions, the same concept,” said Raffaella Accogli, Global CRM Manager, Activation at TheFork. “With the copywriting assistant, I can find a way to talk about the same concept using different words. And, it provides inspiration to develop new approaches.”

“AI, and specifically generative AI, is the competitive edge that is poised to transform the future day-to-day lives of marketers everywhere,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director at IDC. “Increased optimization and creativity are just the tip of the iceberg - AI's potential for marketers goes much deeper. Advancing AI capabilities should be on every customer engagement vendor's radar as marketers continue to seek more efficient and productive ways to evolve and strengthen the way they connect with their consumers.”

Frame AI, the leading AI-powered, customer intelligence platform, announced today the availability of new product features focused on Enterprise use cases, including Cost Tiers, Score Builder, and HIPAA compliance. The product updates will permit customer support and engineering teams to determine the true costs associated with escalated service requests, helping to streamline action, reduce costs and protect revenue.

“In the 21st century, companies cannot choose between creating great customer experiences or staying cost-efficient – they must do both. Customer service executives, CFOs, and CEOs alike need tools to help increase the speed and effectiveness of teams dedicated to addressing the challenges faced by their customer base,” said George Davis, founder and CEO of Frame AI. “These new features enable customer service teams to aggregate and calculate the categories and costs of service tickets specific to their business, and to create solutions for recurring challenges.”

Frame AI’s new Cost Tiers drive accurate cost estimation associated with escalated tickets, reducing vague cost estimates while providing a more precise understanding of costs associated with specific ticket types. Score Builder allows users to calibrate custom scores that predict business outcomes, guiding action by customer success teams. New features supporting HIPAA Compliance, including a full third-party audit, allow users to partner with and serve clients in regulated healthcare industries safely and securely under the coverage of a Business Associate Agreement.

“Customer experience optimization has a direct business impact that goes far beyond simply addressing the needs and concerns of those who have purchased a product or service from your company,” said Mike Lazarow, Frame AI investor and founder of Buddy Media. “My decision to join Frame AI is rooted in my own realization of the great inefficiencies that exist in the customer experience space, and George’s vision of using AI to aggregate, categorize and mitigate lost time, resources and money spent addressing customer needs.”