Quick: what do you get when you combine a phone operator console, faxing, messaging (think IM, e-mail), presence functions (who’s available, when/where), call center software (think IVR, screen pops), multimedia computing (think video conferencing, graphics, PowerPoint presentations) and computer-telephony integration?

 

By some definitions, if most or all of these technologies are combined into a single solution, you have what’s known as “unified communications.” While the concept behind unified communications is nothing new (tying together lots of communications tools has obvious efficiency benefits), the technology has only recently stepped out of the shadows into the limelight of media and business attention.

 

Lots of companies, including Microsoft (News - Alert), are now touting their “unified communications” solutions as the best thing since sliced bread. Yet there are companies that developed unified communications software years ago and only now are starting to get recognized for their forward-thinking strategies.

 

Zeacom is a good example.

 

The company, which makes software for contact centers, was founded in New Zealand in 1994. It then broke into the U.S. market in 2000, where most of its sales and support staff are now located. (Development and financial personnel remain in New Zealand.)

 

Zeacom previously offered two software packages: one marketed as a “messaging” solution, the other as a “contact center” solution. Both, however, were built on the same code base and provided the type of functionality now referred to as unified communications.

 

Recently, the company began marketing both these solutions as one, under the name Zeacom Communications Center 4.1. The unifying of its two software packages is now possible thanks to the attention being paid to unified communications.

 

In other words, people now “get” the advantages of unified communications, so Zeacom can market its software as such.

 

“With the evolution of UC becoming a larger topic, with companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Avaya (News - Alert) getting in the fray and bringing a lot of hype to it, we've been able to take advantage of what we’ve always had—one application for an entire enterprise,” Zeacom’s president, Ernie Wallerstein, told TMCnet. “It does call center, help desk, messaging, Web and e-mail management for everyone in the organization. This is what unified communications is about.”

 

You could even go so far as to say that, rather than being a call center solution, Communications Center 4.1 is more generally a business solution.

 

 

Although its software is robust enough to serve the needs of large enterprises, Zeacom is marketing Communications Center to the small business market. Wallerstein defined “small business” as any company with 300 or fewer agents in its call center and fewer than 2,500 employees overall.

 

Why the small business market?

 

“When you go upstream to the Fortune 2000 enterprises the conversation, rather than starting with features and functions, begins with infrastructure,” Wallerstein said. “That's not what we're about. We don’t have hardware engineers here; we have a lot of very bright men and women who know how to write code.”

 

Currently, Zeacom’s software runs on three platforms: NEC (News - Alert), Avaya and Cisco. The company is in the process of making Communications Center compatible with SIP-based environments so it can integrate with IP shareware systems.

 

“A lot of switches are heading that direction so, by going down the SIP path, we expect we'll be able to integrate with more telephony platforms,” Wallerstein said.

 

That being said, he cautioned that tight integration with any PBX requires working with individual vendors to make everything work perfectly.

 

“As long as a digital phone costs $500 it will be a long way before you can go buy a phone at Radio Shack and plug it into any PBX (News - Alert),” Wallerstein said. “Microsoft is touting that, but even they realize it won’t happen by tomorrow.”

 

 

The move from serving two siloed markets (call center, messaging) to a unified customer base is part of Zeacom’s transformation as a company. Wallerstein himself, who came aboard in January of 2006, is part of that transformation. As he put it, Zeacom is in the process of leaving behind its entrepreneurial roots and working to become a more established organization.

 

Zeacom now has a total of 109 employees at offices in New Zealand, Australia (where NEC resells its software as an OEM product), London, and the U.S., although Wallerstein stressed that the company is not trying to be everywhere for everyone.

 

“We don't have a big central European or Asian presence at this point,” he said. “We would do that through distribution.”

 

 

Wallerstein said Zeacom’s core strength as a company lies in its traditional call center background. But, it has been making unified messaging software for more than ten years, and continued development of this increasingly popular product is a big part of the company’s plans for the future.

 

“Our impression is that the communications aspect of unified communications is actually the harder of those two words,” Wallerstein told TMCnet. “Unifying is one thing, but understanding the real-time and bandwidth aspects of communications is equally important. We believe our experience lends itself well to being able to deliver UC strategies for organizations.”

 

In fact, the company is so confident about UC that it plans to go public in New Zealand during the first half of 2008.

 

“Going public isn’t so much a PR move as a capitalization strategy so we can reinvest in the company and build it faster,” Wallerstein said.

 

 

A key advantage of Zeacom’s software for small businesses, Wallerstein said, is streamlined administration—it can be supported by a single IT manager, covering all staff from the president down to call center agents. Communications Center offers the simplicity of an all-in-one system, something small businesses really value, he said.

 

“Fortune 2000 enterprises can afford to go buy the very best applications for every technology they need,” Wallerstein noted. “Small and medium-sized enterprises need a single application that does many things well.”

 

You could say that describes Communications Center to a T. The software, Wallerstein said, addresses the needs of three internal “markets” within organizations that collectively involve all functions related to customer communications.

 

The first of these “markets” is console operators—the people who handles phone reception duties. This job typically involves directing incoming calls using a robust, digital phone with many built-in applications. Zeacom believes that two things are of utmost importance to operators: presence (status of employees) and operator console (big-picture view of call queues).

 

Of those two things, presence is becoming of increasing importance as companies are coming to realize just how beneficial it can be for the operator to see not just who is available but where they are and what their availability will be at other times. Zeacom’s software integrates presence information with employee Outlook and Lotus calendars to deliver what Wallerstein referred to as “rich presence.”

 

“Not only can a console operator see that an employee is away from his or her desk, but also that he/she is in a meeting and won't be back for another hour,” he said. “Presence is not only about phone status, but has whether the person touched his or her keyboard or mouse during the past x minutes.”

 

The second internal “market” Zeacom’s software serves is knowledge workers. For these employees, the software offers tools like personal greetings, caller-based routing, desk-to-desk chat, Microsoft embedded tools and faxing.

 

“One thing our product does that is pretty unique is the ability to personalize greetings for important individuals, and give those people different options than other callers,” Wallerstein told TMCnet. This lets knowledge workers differentiate how they treat individual callers.

 

Wallerstein himself experienced the advantage of this feature recently while traveling in Europe. He had a laptop with him at a hotel equipped with wireless Internet access. At the time, he was working with a couple of sales reps on a specific deal and he knew they might need input. So, he set up his voicemail to greet them with the additional option of pressing 1 to be transferred to his hotel room phone.

 

Sure enough, one of the reps called and pressed 1 to be transferred to the hotel room phone. Wallerstein picked up, and soon learned that the rep needed input from Zeacom’s CFO because there was a legal issue. Wallerstein was logged into the Zeacom system using his laptop and, seeing that the CFO was at his desk and not on the phone, he initiated a conference with himself, the rep, and the CFO.

 

“This was instead of the rep calling me, getting my voicemail, me getting his message, calling him back, finding out I needed the CFO and then having to call the CFO to see if he was available,” Wallerstein said. “From an executive standpoint, that's a huge productivity boon.”

 

The third internal “market” Zeacom’s software serves is the contact center. In this realm, Communications Center provides a wide variety of tools including intelligent routing, e-mail queuing, fax queuing, Web interactions, IVR, callback, screen pops, custom announcements and desktop contact handling.

 

A few of those features to note are callbacks (blending inbound and outbound calls), self-service IVR (no need to buy a third party application) and intelligent routing (caller is directed to the best agent to handle their inquiry).

 

From an administration standpoint, the fact that all these functions are offered by a single application is a real advantage; it means everything can run from a single server, reducing hardware footprint and cost. Only in cases where additional processing power is needed for applications like speech recognition coupled with IVR would a company need a second server.

The real power of Zeacom’s software, then, is that it combines so many functions into one package. Companies can meet the needs of their console operators, knowledge workers and contact center agents all in one go, rather than buying many separate products.

All this is very well and good, but what about the competition now that UC is really taking off? Wallerstein isn’t worried.

 

“A lot of people are talking about UC conceptually,” he told TMCnet. “We have hundreds of customers already doing this stuff.”

 

And Microsoft?

 

“Everybody notices the 800-pound gorilla in the corner,” Wallerstein told TMCnet. “Microsoft is a big company and they're talking a lot about what they're good at, like document sharing and IM presence, but real-time communication is still relatively new to them.”

 

While he hesitated to predict where the UC market will be five years from now, Wallerstein nonetheless expressed a very rosy outlook for Zeacom.

 

“We're very confident that for the next three to five years we’re in a great position, because the market is looking at something we've been doing for a long time.”