The global conferencing company, InterCall, announced an important element of the company’s unified communications strategy on April 26, 2010. InterCall announced a hosted unified communications service offering for small and medium business. As the world’s largest conferencing service provider, with over 1 billion minutes of audio and web conferencing minutes/month, InterCall sees an opportunity to expand its offerings to gain customer wallet-share for customers they serve by leveraging the company’s relationship with CallTower, a UCaaS market participant.
The InterCall-CallTower alliance leverages the Microsoft UC portfolio to host services based on:
- Microsoft Exchange (email and calendaring)
- Office Communicator (instant messaging and VoIP)
- SharePoint (content management system)
- Active Directory (database and user authentication services)
As part of the offering, customers can also gain hosted support for Cisco UC Manager too.
The recent acquisition of professional services and system integrator company – SKT Business Communications Solutions by West Corporation, the parent of InterCall – provides the skilled personnel who can assist customers with the necessary consulting, project management or implementation services to turn up these high productivity, but highly complex services.
This offering targets the yet-unrealized potential of the SMB marketplace where hosted services and many of these services (CMS, IM, VoIP) have not yet been deployed. Combining the power of hosted conferencing services, with a hosted UC offering for email, IM, CMS and IP telephony promises a compelling value proposition from a brand that thousands of small and medium-sized companies respect.
