Following up on several of our newsletters about unified communications trends, how unified communications is a useful tool for contact centers, and our concept of "unified applications," we recently had the chance to interview Ernie Wallerstein, President Americas at Zeacom for his perspectives on our positions. Zeacom is a global provider of unified communications solutions with a customer base of more than 2500 small and midsized organizations in 25 countries.

While Wallerstein agreed with many of our points, he had a few additional refinements that we agree with. First, commenting about how to position unified communications, Wallerstein said that his company looks at “unified communications as a [business strategy] - if an organization wants to use unified communications it is doing so to try and enable employees.” Consequently, he reasoned, the best approach to unified communications is to first decide what improvements are needed for business processes along with internal and external communications.

Wallerstein agreed with us when we suggested that unified communications interfaces must vary within an organization based on the employees job responsibilities, supporting our view that the user experience and interface requirement within the same company are quite different for the call center rep and the CEO. But he also believes that “they both need common tools.”

As to our thought on improving the generic enterprise with contact center tools (such as skills-based routing using interactive voice response [IVR] to map a specific customer request to the employee skill needed, then routing the call based on skill set and with presence monitoring), Wallerstein aptly pointed out that “contact centers have been doing this for years, but the challenge to bring this to the rest of the enterprise in the user interface.”

Finally, as to the implication of these trends for his own company, Wallerstein said that traditionally Zeacom had sold their software-based solution as two products, with one targeted to the contact center and the other to meet messaging needs in the enterprise. However he notes that since the industry has converged on the concept of unified communications, the feature set for Zeacom’s core product easily evolved into one software platform that can bring both a suite of specialized contact center and enterprise-wide unified communications functionality.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.