Carole Dillard, director of channel marketing for Zeacom (News - Alert), said Unified Communications has become “all the buzz” in the enterprise communications space, as was evident during last week’s INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO held in Los Angeles.

During the show, Zeacom exhibited the latest release of Zeacom Communications Center. The contact center and enterprise communications system targets three audiences; contact center agents, console operators, and executive and knowledge workers. It provides rich presence, unified messaging, profiles, unique caller profiles, Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook integration and a full multimedia contact center solution. Version 4.1 supports Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007, Outlook 2007 and Vista. Its Executive Outlook plug-in offers presence, telephony, fax, and voice messaging inside Microsoft Outlook.

Dillard said the company’s UC offering “attracted many attendees because of all the buzz in the industry about UC.” She said this year’s ITEXPO (News - Alert) West event was well attended and the company’s booth saw a steady flow of visitors during the two days the exhibit hall was open.

“Many of the resellers were looking for solutions that would help them solve their customer’s pain points,” Dillard said during a brief interview with TMCnet on Friday.

She added that “many folks are looking for hosted solutions,” and that she and her team “were surprised at the number of International attendees.”

“UC solutions are being evaluated by many customers,” she said.

Zeacom’s contact center and UC solution is offered in one application and is delivered on one server with one administration and reporting tool. The single application and reporting tool offers SMBs with limited IT staff the ability to manage the application in-house.

Zeacom President Ernie Wallerstein (News - Alert) took part in a panel discussion entitled “Streamline and Integrate Your Business Processes” during this year’s ITEXPO West. The session focused on how organizations, through the combination of IP Telephony and Web services, can embed real time interactive communication services into a range of business processes to enhance collaboration and productivity. The panel explored the technical requirements needed for SOA, such as interoperability between applications, and took an overview of processes, reliability, redundancy and security. The speakers gave real world examples of how businesses have effectively used the SOA approach to improve business processes.

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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.