Zeacom to support Microsoft's software telephony platform

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NZ contact centre software company now one of eight managed partners supporting Lync

By Randal Jackson | Wellington | Wednesday, 1 February, 2012 | 1 Comment

Zeacom has completed a beta programme to make its flagship contact centre software available for Lync – Microsoft’s software telephony platform.

ZCC (Zeacom Communications Center) has been deployed at Lync sites in northern Europe and Asia Pacific.

As part of the beta programme, Spotless Group, a $A2.5 billion facilities management company, migrated 600 Australian head office staff and its mission-critical IT helpdesk to Microsoft Lync without missing a call, says Sam Williams, Zeacom’s vice president marketing.

“The helpdesk supports the company’s payroll function – ensuring that more than 40,000 workers are paid accurately and on time. Spotless successfully piloted and moved its ZCC-powered call centre from the company’s old PBX to Lync in less than four weeks,” he says.

“We’ve been working on Lync for the past 14 months. It’s being driven by industry change. It became obvious a few years ago that Microsoft was getting serious about business telephony.

“Microsoft launched Lync in November 2010 as its enterprise class telephony system.”

Zeacom, which does its development work in Auckland, already had ZCC enabled for Cisco and Avaya.

Williams says the software represents a significant change in the way telephony is developing. “We’re starting to see the replacement of voice communications with office productivity systems. It’s a subtle way of shifting voice into the productivity route.”

Zeacom is one of eight managed partners with Microsoft.

The company has more than 4000 customer sites worldwide and had been delivering enterprise-class contact centre functionality on the world’s most prevalent telephony platforms for 17 years.

“With the release of ZCC for Lync, organisations now have even greater choice when it comes to moving their existing contact centre solution from one voice platform to another,” Williams says.

Targeting up to 400 seats on Lync, ZCC allows contact centres to control the delivery of every contact – from voice calls and email to SMS and social media alerts.

“When it comes to contact centres, it’s not what you do but how you do it that matters,” Williams says. “Zeacom’s use of Microsoft's native UCMA architecture and trusted conferencing platform allows us to offer a more expansive functionality. Our heritage of using other manufacturers’ native methods of integration gives us a proven track record in delivering highly functional call centre and business process automation solutions.”

Since its inception in 1994, Zeacom has maintained a channel-only sales model and has a team of subject matter experts committed to supporting its partners worldwide, allowing them to build relationships around business process automation.

“Almost 25 percent of Zeacom sites use business process automation or communications enabled business processes (CEBP) to drive additional productivity out of their solutions,” Williams says.

Zeacom has partnered with NEC for 17 years, is a Cisco Premier Partner and a registered member of the Avaya DevConnect program.

The company generated revenue of $US25 million last year, with 30 percent growth over the previous year. Williams says it is projecting another 30 percent growth this year.

Zeacom has 100 staff in Auckland, 25 in Australia, 10 in the UK and 65 in the US.

Comments

more lync growth seems to be a number of companies lining up to work with the Microsoft Lync program.
Posted by jim martin at 17:39:22 on February 17, 2012

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