When Skip Chilcott first joined Microsoft (News - Alert) Corporation through an acquisition about eight years ago, the first thing issued to him was a tablet with touch capabilities equivalent to Microsoft Lync. Thereafter, things started to slowly change, but Lync didn’t find success overnight.

“We had our share of challenges in order to prove Lync,” Chilcott explained alongside a panel of experts at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami 2013 this morning.

Over the next 18 months Lync was officially released with everything in its place. At first, according to Chilcott, companies were not willing to immediately jump into something completely different like Lync. But as the users picked it up and started to gain momentum, they saw where Lync was helping them to save time, and then Lync exploded.  

“Lync is now growing faster than we anticipated,” said Chilcott. “We are not having to tell people about it. Partners are now simply asking for it.”

Jeff Neikirk of Verizon (News - Alert) Enterprise Solutions commented, “When you look at unified communications (UC) and what Lync is delivering, there is a promise on the end user perspective.”

Still, customers are struggling with complexities in the data center including integrating Lync into existing telephony environments, especially when it comes to large corporations. “A major transformation doesn’t happen overnight. And, the challenge for us is to reduce that complexity,” said Neikirk.

As a partner of Microsoft, for Zeacom (News - Alert), it is all about an available market. “It was slow to emerge when we started betting on Lync three years ago. But, in the last year the opportunity has picked up significantly,” said John Cray of Zeacom.

Over the last year, Lync integration has gotten a lot easier, according to Alan Percy of AudioCodes (News - Alert). In fact, the company’s development team likes integrating Lync because the deployment time has shrunk significantly.

From an end user perspective, Hurricane Sandy took out AudioCodes’ data center for a few days, and left it with very limited Lync connectivity.

Percy explained, “It was one of the most painful few days of the company’s existence. Lync has become so integrated into our business and the things we do every day. It really showed us the value of Lync. It goes to show that you don’t know what you have until you take it away for a while.”

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