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New technologies emerging in the communications space have helped to drive the demand for Unified Communications software solutions. To gain a better idea of the impact in the market in the last year and what to expect moving forward, TMC recently spoke with Bob Wise (News - Alert), Executive Vice President with West IP Communications, UC Division for West Corporation. Wise shared that the trends that emerged in UC software in 2011 will continue into 2012, including the emergence of the cloud, advancements in cloud-based offerings and the value of choice in a UC solutions.

 Looking back at 2011, can you highlight some of the most important advancements or trends that emerged in the market you serve?  What were the key trends that impacted your business?

From the perspective of the unified communications market, I would say that some of the biggest trends that emerged in 2011 will continue for 2012.

This includes the emergence of the cloud, the advancements of hosted/cloud-based offerings and the market’s understanding of the value of voice, within a UC solution. That is clearly an advantage for IP telephony and network, which is where we are very much focused in our business.

While this is not technically an advancement, per se, it is an advancement in understanding and acceptance in those areas, which is an important trend for our business and the market as a whole. It means that customers are much more willing to meet with us to hear the value proposition of the cloud, hosted telephony and hosted network services.

Another advancement has taken place in the increased capability of the integration of applications, i.e. the ability to integrate conferencing and collaboration apps; email and presence, which are the different applications that comprise part of our solution set. The ability to integrate proprietary solutions, partner solutions like Cisco (News - Alert) and Microsoft, and the advancements of those products to allow those products gives us the opportunity to deliver fully-hosted UC offerings, with some different applications as part of it.

What were your company's biggest achievements/ announcements in the past year?

Looking at this from the perspective of the UC division of West, the biggest achievement for the organization was the acquisition of Smoothstone.

This acquisition gave us the solutions and technology capabilities, operations, support, experience in sales, and is the foundation for the division. Smoothstone has helped us to integrate everything we were doing prior to the acquisition, and from my perspective, it was clearly the biggest success for our division in 2011.

In addition to that, I am proud that we became a Microsoft Office 365 ACP Partner. InterCall (News - Alert) is one of only three partners that have their audio-conferencing platforms integrated in to Microsoft Office 365. So, when a customer purchases Microsoft Office 365 from us, or even over the Microsoft website, they are presented with an option to select us for their audio conferencing. That was a big accomplishment for us.

In line with that, I would say another achievement for us came when we became a partner with Cisco in launching our Voice Max CE platform, which is based on Cisco HCS. We have been a significant part of Cisco’s for years in addition to being the largest reseller of Webex, and this solidifies are commitment to Cisco UC solutions as well.

I would say that the final major accomplishment of 2011 would be the acquisition of POSTcti (News - Alert). This acquisition brought us some professional services capabilities in Europe, but also a solution called Unified Desktop. The foundation of that solution combines Microsoft Lync and Exchange with telephony to provide an end-to-end solution, and will be the foundation of a similar North America solution in the global Unified Desktop solution.

Looking back at 2011, how would you characterize the year for your company?

2011 was the year we were able to get ourselves in the business. Obviously the acquisitions played a big part in this, but we have also added some key people and capabilities. It was the year that we put everything together, launched our products and services, began integrating other West applications and built the foundation for becoming a leading hosted UC provider.

Our customer base within InterCall and West understands where we are going; the market understands where we are going. Keeping that foundation of being a world class service provider will obviously play well with these new capabilities.

What are your predictions for 2012 for the VoIP and communications market?

2012 will be a year of expanding the continued awareness and adoption of cloud based communications. That is the number one thing that will distinguish 2012 in the unified communications market – more than new products – just the continued adoption of cloud based communications and hosted telephony.

From a product standpoint, I do believe the major vendors will continue to make advancements in this area, due to this adoption, and that will further open up integration opportunities for solution providers.

We will continue to see growth and acceptance of the three major UC components – presence, telephony and network solutions – on a hosted basis.

'Cloud' has been a pretty hot topic this year and seems to continue gaining steam - do you feel this will continue into 2012 and what are some of your thoughts around the future of CLOUD?

Again, I think this is going to expand. I think customers will continue to open their mind to allow more and more applications to be hosted by the cloud as they see the value, the productivity, the ability to cut costs, the security – all of those things will increase the acceptance of cloud.

What can we look forward to from your company in 2012?

The market will see the continued growth and expansion of our own, proprietary Smoothstone platform; as we are always looking to continue to advance that platform. We will also continue advancement of our partner platforms, the HCS platform – integrating and adding more hosted solutions from Cisco. On the Microsoft side, we will expand our Unified Desktop platform from an EMEA-based platform to a North American platform. We will become our own hosted provider of Microsoft Lync integrated with Exchange, telephony and Network services.

We will continue to grow our professional services and hosted network capabilities to support these platforms and UC services, in addition to looking to expand our hosted telephony and network services outside of North America.

Finally, looking at our internal platforms, I would say we will integrate some of the services and applications that are offered today through InterCall and West into this UC platform, so that customers can start to look at a single platform for many of the services that they use for the entire organization.