Lync Migration Featured Article

Lync Qualification Creates NICE Opportunities in Financial Services

By Erik Linask Group Editorial Director

Going back to 2007, with the initial launch of OCS, Microsoft (News - Alert) Unified Communications launches and enhancements have been met with not only great market interest, but swift action. With few exceptions, any vendor that fits in some way into the MS ecosystem – whether officially or by nature – is quick to ensure interoperability at the very least, and official certification where needed in order to ensure it doesn’t lose business to Microsoft shops.

Now that Microsoft has taken a leadership position in the UC space with Lync, that interoperability becomes even more important – and when addressing verticals with strict regulatory and compliance requirements, even critical. Financial institutions, healthcare facilities, and other heavily regulated industries can ill afford to even consider non-compliant solutions, let alone actually adopt them. This means that tech providers that have designs on competing in these markets must go through the steps to become qualified to support Lync.

NICE Systems (News - Alert) has taken that step and now announced its trading recording solution is now qualified with Lync, giving it a clear advantage over non-Lync-qualified recording solutions. For financial services firms, it means investment protection and consistency of technology across its user bases, as the recording solution that has been designed for trading floor deployment, can now also be extend to all other Lync users across the enterprise.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone, as NICE is a Microsoft developer partner, but it extends the concept that all vendors, even partners, will have to go through some level of interop work. In this case, it simply may be a quicker process, given NICE’s membership in the developer program, and also places it into a Lync ecosystem that includes hardware, software and support vendors – from billing to SBCs – that can coexist within a Lync deployment.

“Our partners are helping us to extend the Lync 2013 software platform with applications that meet an expanding variety of business and communications needs,” says Dan Benedict, Program Manager of Lync ISV Developer Programs, Microsoft.

The qualification allows financial services organizations to implement Lync-based UC and a single recording solution – in whatever combination or order they choose – without worry of being out of compliance or lacking interoperability. For NICE, it extends its reach into the financial services market, as more and more financial institutions are migrating toe Lync.

Edited by Maurice Nagle