MetTel meets the requirements to be designated as a Managed Facilities Voice Network (MFVN) as defined by 2010 NFPA 72

 MetTel, a leading provider of advanced communication and digital transformation solutions, is pleased to announce that it has obtained approval from the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for deploying its Managed Facilities Voice Network (MFVN) to replace legacy plain old telephone (POTS) lines with reliable and resilient voice communication services compatible with legacy equipment like fire and burglar alarms, fax machines, elevator lines and modems.

This solution will help digitally transform the way organizations manage their critical communications infrastructure and add the enhanced predictive and proactive maintenance features of managed network services.

By leveraging MetTel's innovative approach, organizations can transition seamlessly from traditional POTS lines to an advanced voice network that delivers enhanced functionalities, increased flexibility, and improved cost efficiency. MetTel's POTS transformation solution has already been deployed nationwide for a large number of enterprise clients. With this approval, MetTel can offer a POTS replacement solution that complies with the rigorous standards set by the FDNY and NFPA72, providing peace of mind and a future-ready communication framework for customers.

"Our approval from the FDNY is a significant milestone for MetTel and reaffirms our commitment to delivering innovative and transformational managed communication solutions," said Ed Fox, CTO at MetTel. "We are thrilled to offer our MFVN solution as a reliable and compliant alternative to traditional POTS lines, enabling organizations to modernize their communications infrastructure while meeting the highest safety and regulatory standards."

MetTel's MFVN empowers organizations with a wide range of advanced voice services, including voice over IP (VoIP), unified communications, and collaboration tools. By leveraging MetTel's robust network infrastructure, organizations can optimize their communications, improve operational efficiency, and enhance overall productivity.

MetTel has a strong track record of delivering innovative communication and digital transformation solutions to clients across a broad array of industries. With a customer-centric approach and a commitment to technological excellence, MetTel helps organizations streamline operations, drive growth, and unlock their full potential.

Glide, a leading no-code platform for building custom business software, announced another milestone in no code software development with the launch of native integrations and an improved, faster editor.

Until now, customers relied on workarounds or spent time stitching together third-party tools to control external services via their apps. This process was challenging to set up and maintain, especially at scale. With the launch of this new capability, businesses can now create custom workflows that connect with their business tools directly in Glide, saving time and resources in the process. Key improvements to the Actions Editor also centralize different business tools in one easy-to-use, seamless interface.  

Together, these new updates bring an unprecedented level of connection and ease of use to Glide so customers can connect critical business workflows and unlock exciting new capabilities:

Boost communication across teams: Send emails, SMS texts with Twilio, push notifications, and Slack or Microsoft Teams messages with a button push.

Automate away busywork: Create PDFs, generate CSV files, send Stripe invoices, collect e-signatures with DocuSign, automatically add events to a Gmail calendar, and more.

Unlock the power of AI: Complete prompts, generate images, summarize text, and answer questions about proprietary data with OpenAI and Microsoft Azure.

Cisco (CSCO) announced it is reimagining the way people work with new, powerful generative AI technology. Cisco will harness large language models (LLMs) across its Collaboration and Security portfolios to help organizations drive productivity and simplicity for their workforce.

Expectations are at an all-time high – organizations are grappling with how to deliver unrivaled experiences for hybrid workers, while safeguarding their businesses from sophisticated cyber threats.

According to Cisco's 2023 State of Global Innovation Study, IT professionals rank generative AI as the technology most likely to have a significant impact on their business, with 85% of those saying they're prepared for its impact. Cisco recognizes the important role generative AI will play in advancing the future of work and is committed to providing hybrid workers with an efficient, safer, and more productive, work experience.

"Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technology to become materially more productive," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Security and Collaboration, Cisco. "At Cisco, we've been using AI for years. Now we're unveiling how we're incorporating generative AI into our existing products, helping customers drive real value to unlock the most secure, unrivaled work experiences possible."

New Summarization Capabilities in Webex by Cisco
With every work interaction being hybrid, employees, and customers need collaboration experiences that empower them to do their best work. Within the Webex Suite, new summarization capabilities that help people get up to speed in seconds will include:

• "Catch Me Up" will allow users to quickly catch up on missed interactions, including meetings, calling, chats and more.
• Intelligent meeting summaries with key points and action items. Users can opt in to automatically generate the most important elements of a Webex meeting, extract the key points, and capture action items with owners. This will be a huge time-saver for attendees and people unable to join a meeting – eliminating the need to listen to a recording or read through transcripts.
• Summaries in Vidcast, the company's video messaging tool. This capability will produce highlights and chapters so viewers can navigate to the most important parts of the video quickly.
• New conversation summaries in Webex Contact Center will provide agents with a fast, automated way to consume long-form text from digital chats with customers as well as facilitating post-call wrap-up and resolution with customers. For example, if a customer is escalated to a call with a human agent, they expect that agent to be informed and not have to repeat their frustrations. Chat summaries provides the agent with a clear summarization of issues and resolutions already explored via self-service and a summary of the call to both the agent and customer once it ends.

Moving Security from Complex to Conversational 
Cisco is investing in cutting-edge innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning that will augment security staff by simplifying operations and increasing efficacy. Further delivering on its Security Cloud vision (link to Day 1 release), Cisco is previewing new generative AI capabilities to simplify policy management and improve threat response.

Effective security policy creation and management is an oftentimes extremely complex but critical function of cybersecurity hygiene. There is little room for error and the process of making simple edits that won't interfere with or override previous rules is extremely time consuming and technically challenging. The volume, inconsistency, and complexity of maintaining all of these policies across all of these systems creates a significant risk that opens the door for attacks.

The Cisco Security Cloud will leverage a generative AI Policy Assistant to address this problem by enabling security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and evaluate how to best implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure. 

This week's preview showed how the Cisco Policy Assistant can reason with the existing firewall policy set to implement and simplify rules within the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. It is the first of many examples of how generative AI can reimagine policy management across the Cisco Security Cloud.

Augmenting Analysts with Machine Speed and Scale
Threat detection and response is another complex and high stakes responsibility of the security operations where time is of the essence and analysts must rapidly gain understanding of complex systems at machine scale.

Cisco's security operations center (SOC) Assistant will augment security analysts with the context to make the right decisions at the right time. The SOC Assistant will provide a comprehensive situation analysis for analysts, correlating intel across the Cisco Security Cloud platform solutions, relaying potential impacts, and providing recommended actions. Significantly reducing the time needed for SOC teams to respond to potential threats.

Cisco will preview its generative AI solution for Webex and Security Cloud onstage at Cisco LIVE 2023. Webex summarization, policy management and SOC Assistant Summaries will be available by the end of calendar year 2023. The additional SOC Assistant features will be available in the first half of calendar 2024.

Cisco's Approach to Generative AI
For years, Cisco has leveraged AI with audio, video, natural language understanding, and analytics to create unrivaled experiences for Webex users – with the security Cisco is known for. New enhancements in LLM and generative AI are advancing this even further to deliver unrivaled hybrid work experiences. Webex has established a first set of principles, consisting of multi-modal support, permissions, privacy, and accuracy for its enterprise-grade AI. This includes only using data that individuals already have permission to access, based on the privacy and security rules of that specific data source.

Integration with Google Cloud and Joint Go to Market Will Extend Typeface's Highly Customized Generative AI to Businesses and Workspace Users

 Typeface, the generative AI platform for enterprise content creation, today announced a major partnership and deep technology integration with Google Cloud to power personalized marketing content at scale for enterprises worldwide. By integrating Typeface with Google Cloud's large language models and launching Typeface as a plugin in the Google Workspace Marketplace, businesses can now quickly create highly customized, data-driven content for multiple marketing channels. The new partnership will bring capabilities that extend Typeface and Google Cloud to more businesses and millions of Workspace users, making it easy for marketers to utilize Typeface's content creation platform.

To fully harness the creative potential of generative AI and advance marketing objectives, enterprises require a platform that can adapt to rapid innovation and deliver brand-specific content, safely and securely. Now, businesses can use Typeface with Google Cloud's generative AI capabilities to easily produce genuine, captivating content that deeply engages customers at scale, improving operational efficiency while retaining branding consistency and control.

"Generative AI has the potential to streamline common marketing processes and tasks, like creating new, highly-tailored and engagement content for campaigns," said Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP, Global Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. "Bringing Google Cloud's generative AI capabilities and models to Typeface means users gain additional capabilities to build marketing content tailored to their brand voice and audiences. We're delighted to partner with Typeface to apply generative AI to more real-world business use cases."

"We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud to transform how enterprises engage with their audiences through highly tailored, AI-powered content" said Abhay Parasnis, Founder and CEO of Typeface. "With Google Cloud's state-of-the-art AI language models and Typeface's deep personalization capabilities, marketers can seamlessly produce brand-specific content right within their Google Workspace environments."

Together, Typeface and Google Cloud will offer users:

• Best-in-class generative AI technology that utilizes Google Cloud's cutting-edge generative AI capabilities and latest large language models through Vertex AI to stay at the forefront of AI innovation.
• Data-driven personalization through a seamless integration that will enable businesses to quickly utilize their customer data stored in BigQuery alongside Typeface's brand-specific knowledge, helping customers quickly tailor content to individual products and personas at scale.
• Bringing Typeface to the Google Workspace Marketplace, with compatibility for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Drive, and Google Chat. More than 9 million organizations pay for Google Workspace today, and these companies can now adopt Typeface through the Google Workspace Marketplace to create multiple marketing assets more efficiently from within their existing workflows.
• Joint go-to-market initiatives with Google Cloud to drive widespread adoption and faster value creation through generative AI with global enterprises.

The Automation Success Platform launches the first set of innovations and partnerships to securely put generative AI into action across documents, business teams, and developers

Automation Anywhere, the #1 leader in cloud-native intelligent automation, today announced 3 major innovations that safely and securely put generative AI to work across the Automation Success Platform to accelerate productivity across businesses and deliver on its mission to help every company build a digital workforce.

In order to meet global GDP targets, businesses will need to increase productivity by an estimated 50 percent, according to McKinsey. As CEOs and board leaders contemplate ways to solve the widening productivity gap, generative AI is arising as a powerful tool in daily life. The Automation Success Platform unlocks the potential of generative AI to drive action across the enterprise, in addition to helping customers ensure responsible use of their AI to the benefit of their employees and stakeholders.

"Every company is in the midst of a productivity crisis. However, the combination of generative AI and automation has given us the power to unlock this next wave of productivity, completely transforming the way we work," said Mihir Shukla, CEO, and Co-Founder, Automation Anywhere. "The Automation Success Platform provides new and creative solution for everyday business challenges beyond chat. It's about doing - from quickly responding to emails to generating new automations on-demand."

Automation Anywhere Puts Generative AI into Action to Accelerate Impact

Generative AI is now infused across the entire Automation Success Platform, bringing together the productivity gains of automation and compounding them with AI, making the path to ROI faster than ever.  And because the Automation Success Platform is uniquely architected to be fully open and extensible, companies can leverage any best-of-breed LLMs with flexibility to support use-cases most valuable to a business. With this initial announcement come three key innovations: 

Automation Co-Pilot + Generative AI for Business Users 

• Last year, we announced Automation Co-Pilot - an automation assistant embedded into any application. Now Automation Co-Pilot is GPT-powered, accelerating team productivity even more by enabling them to action any generative AI use-case across any system, from creating and summarizing content to sending emails and providing recommendations.

Automation Co-Pilot + Generative AI for Automators

• Automation Co-Pilot is now embedded in the developer experience and connected to generative AI, empowering everyone, from professional developers to business users, to use generative AI to transform conversation into automation and expedite the speed to automation ROI.  Users quickly create automations by having a natural language conversation with Automation Co-Pilot, opening up automation development to virtually anyone in an organization.

Document Automation + Generative AI 

• Document Automation now uses the power of generative AI for fast understanding, extraction and summarization of data from an ever-growing universe of unstructured document types, in addition to structured and semi-structured. More document types means more data can be unlocked. And because it's connected to automation, data can be inserted right into a process workflow without any lifting and shifting. 

The Automation Success Platform is built with the highest security, privacy, and compliance standards that support best practices that ensure responsible use for AI. Features include guardrails for what users can and can't do, options for human feedback and oversight, and built-in data privacy measures, making it the perfect partner to ensure AI is used responsibly.

"AI powered roughly 20% of business automation spending in 2022," according to Maureen Fleming, program vice president in IDC's AI and Automation Research Practice. "With generative AI poised to spread across all areas of an enterprise, we are at the very beginning of a cycle that will see generative automation rapidly expand automation opportunities, speed up automation development, and enable users to automate as needed to do their jobs."

The innovation leaps provided by integrating generative AI and automation benefit businesses across industries. The Automation Success Platform, infused with generative AI, is the perfect set of technologies to serve customers in verticals including healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services, to streamline operations, improve customer service, enhance efficiency, and stay ahead of the competition, meanwhile protecting the ethics and standards of their organization.

Automation Co-Pilot + Generative AI for Business Users is generally available to customers today. An early preview of Automation Co-Pilot + Generative AI for Automators will be available in July with signups open today. And Document Automation + Generative AI will be available in Q3.

Advertising Demand Side Platform leader partners with Confiant 

Confiant, the anti-malvertising leader, is proud to announce that MediaMath, a leading Demand Side Platform (DSP), has chosen the newly launched Confiant DSP Solution to protect MediaMath clients from ad security and ad quality violations to provide a superior and secure experience for their users.

As a leading DSP, MediaMath manages more than 3,500 active advertisers. Malicious, disruptive, and annoying or inappropriate ads degrade the user experience and drive adoption of ad blockers. MediaMath is committed to providing their audience with the safest, most secure, and quickest web experience, free of malicious advertising, scams, annoying or inappropriate content, and without exposure to threats that are commonly spread through the programmatic ad bidding process by threat actors. One in every 140 programmatic impressions had serious security or quality violations, a 104% increase in quality violations and nearly doubling security violations over both 2020 and 2021, reaching a three year peak per the 2023 MAQ Index. MediaMath selected the Confiant DSP solution to identify ad security, and quality violations so that MediaMath remains in control of what is served to end users through their platform.

"Confiant is pledged to elevating the industry's control capabilities and delivering exceptional end user experience by eliminating ad security, and quality violations," said Louis-David Mangin, CEO and Cofounder, Confiant, Inc. "We are thrilled to extend our protection to MediaMath and appreciate their trust in choosing us as their ad verification partner," concluded Mangin.

"MediaMath is proud to partner with industry leader Confiant to continue protecting our clients from disruptive and malicious advertising. We are committed to eradicating any instances of malware and optimizing user experience." - Sylvain Le Borgne, Chief Partnership Officer, MediaMath.

"MediaMath has a long-standing commitment to a secure advertising supply chain, and to protecting our exchange and publisher partners and the end user. By working with an industry leader like Confiant, we are able to ensure that our advertiser clients are able to maintain the best possible relationship with consumers through robust protection of the ad delivery process from quality concerns and the influence of malvertising and malware." - Justin Adler-Swanberg, Director of Marketplace Quality, MediaMath

Aside from the value that digital advertising delivers, the programmatic process introduces many risks related to security, and user experience. Confiant's technology actively monitors billions of ad impressions and trillions of ad auctions each month to detect and block malicious activity, and low-quality ads, providing a safeguard against cyber threats including malware, phishing, scams, as well as disruptive ads, and consent violations.

Confiant empowers and protects digital publishers and premium ad platforms with actionable data to ensure the digital ad ecosystem is safe and secure for everyone. Confiant's team of security engineers identify threat actors, malvertising, security, and quality issues in the ad ecosystem that affect enterprises, publishers, platforms and their customers.

Quarterly report provides streaming insights at the local market level for the first time.

Nielsen today announced the launch of its Local Streaming Insights Quarterly Solution; a new report that provides metrics on TV app usage, streaming to the glass, for over 20 major streaming apps at the local market level. The quarterly reports are available for the top 56 local markets and include insights on subscription streaming services (e.g., Netflix), ad-supported streaming services (e.g., Pluto TV), and MVPD and vMVPD apps (e.g., DirecTV Stream, other leading providers).

For the first time, Nielsen clients will have access to syndicated reports with streaming insights that are specific to the local audiences in which they are targeting.

"We are delighted to provide a new and impactful solution to support our clients' understanding of the rapidly evolving viewing landscape," said Catherine Herkovic, EVP and Managing Director, Nielsen Local. "We are committed to working alongside our clients to help them deliver on their business objectives and access valuable local audiences at a deeper level."

Nielsen's industry leading Local TV measurement includes persons-level demographics for traditional cable, satellite, broadband only and over-the-air viewers. The combination of Nielsen's Local TV panels plus return path data empowers Nielsen's customers to activate and measure local media buys with confidence. Nielsen reports viewing across devices and is the leading measurement company to provide direct persons measurement, inclusive of incremental out-of-home (OOH) audiences in select markets, via Nielsen's proprietary Portable People Meter (PPM).

Zone-Based Heatmaps powered by Contentsquare enables Optimizely users to leverage heatmaps and data analyses to quickly uncover meaningful customer insights and enhance experiments

Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today announced it has expanded its partnership with digital experience analytics platform Contentsquare to enhance its experimentation capabilities with comprehensive journey analytics. Zone-Based Heatmaps from Contentsquare is a part of a two-way integration that provides Optimizely Web Experimentation users with actionable insights on customers' in-page behavior, a deeper understanding of the reasons behind experiments' performance, and a pathway toward fully optimized digital experiences.

Today, many teams struggle to identify and understand their most valuable users, segments, and experiments without a single view of all interactions on their websites. Available as a Chrome Extension, Zone-Based Heatmaps allows marketing teams to access a holistic view of customer behavior needed to establish always-on optimization that fuels personalization at scale.

Optimizely and Contentsquare's existing bidirectional integration has already afforded both brands greater opportunity to elevate the customer-centricity of industry leaders from American Express and HP to top retailers like H&M and New Era.

The expanded partnership demonstrates how both organizations are continually striving to make digital experiences even better. Zone-Based Heatmaps enables marketing teams to glean and quickly act on unique engagement, conversion, and revenue data for each of its website page elements. Paired with Optimizely, marketers can perform deeper evaluations of ongoing and completed experiments and uncover new, revenue-driving experiments to run.

"With a limited view of website interactions, most organizations struggle to understand what converts customers and where on a website they get lost," said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely. "Now with Zone-Based Heatmaps from Contentsquare, our experimentation users can better grasp "the why" behind customer behaviors and prioritize their test roadmap to deliver the best possible user experience. By combining the forces of two proven leaders in the digital space, Optimizely and Contentsquare's continued partnership allows our customers to deliver the experiences needed to keep pace with the rate of change and ever-growing consumer expectations."

"We're thrilled to continue our collaborative effort to help teams innovate with confidence," said Jonathan Cherki, CEO of Contentsquare. "There's now little room for doubt when it comes to meaningful customer engagement. The expanded partnership demonstrates how both organizations are continually striving to make digital experiences even better. Zone-Based Heatmaps enables marketing teams to glean and quickly act on unique insights for each of its website page elements. Paired with Optimizely, marketers can perform deeper evaluations of ongoing and completed experiments and uncover new, revenue-driving experiments to run."

In addition to Optimizely and Contentsquare customers, this news benefits users of Google Optimize who will need a robust experimentation offering when the platform sunsets on September 30, 2023.