At ITEXPO West, Zeacom Announces Acquisition, Emphasizes Mobile

Zeacom (News - Alert) (www.zeacom.com) is an innovative vendor of contact center and unified communications software with offices in New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.

 

Zeacom focuses on SMBs, particularly those having both contact center and communication management needs. Zeacom engaged Yours Truly in a fascinating conversation about their products and acquisitions at TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West, held this week in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

 

Today, Zeacom announced that it has purchased New Zealand-based Talking Computer’s Mi-Audio and Mi-Eval product lines for an undisclosed amount. The addition and integration of these product lines will enhance the functionality of the company’s Zeacom Communication Center (ZCC) 5.1 UC suite to include voice recording and training modules for customer interaction solutions.

 

Brady Cox (News - Alert), VP of Sales, says, “Whereas the Mi-Audio module is an inexpensive Windows-based call recording technology for contact centers, Mi-Eval is great for quality assurance. It provides an easy and accessible grading system for agents in call centers. The whole idea is to randomly sample agent performance metrics over time and compare them at intervals, so that contact center managers can determine and display the agents’ progress, or lack thereof. Managers used to listen to agents in real time, scribble notes and feed information into a database. Now that all has changed.”

 

Used in conjunction with the Integrated Evaluation, Call Assessment and Coaching module, Mi-Audio and Mi-Eval will provide Zeacom customers with objective evaluation, training and ongoing support.

 

“These products enable us to offer one of two application functions that we didn’t in the past” says Cox. “This leaves workforce management as the only other area that we don’t cover as of yet. Fortunately, when it comes to contact centers, we do everything else. And of course, our technology has been found to be beneficial when applied outside of the contact center too, and that remains a significant focus for us.”

 

Miles Valentine, CEO of Zeacom says, “It was an absolutely logical step for us to acquire these product lines and incorporate them into our ZCC Suite. We will offer these options to our existing contact center customers, and immediately integrate them as appropriate. Interestingly, there are over 2,000 contact centers worldwide using the ZCC Suite that could immediately benefit by having this additional functionality made available. We now provide what I believe is the most advanced and comprehensive unified communications solution on the market. This acquisition solidifies our already strong functionality in the business-critical contact center divisions of staff training and call recording.”

 

Moreover, Zeacom at ITEXPO West is showcasing its state-of-the art Executive Mobile module, an integral component of ZCC 5.1, Executive Mobile empowers end-users with advanced UC functionality on their smart phone or other handheld device.

 

Executive Mobile gives individuals freedom to manage their presence and availability status, effectively removing the demarcation between desktop and mobile. A large subset of functionality currently available on the desktop (single mailbox, presence profiles and directory) will be available on Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices.

 

For executives who are increasingly mobile and yet must be accessible 24/7 and who must be able to benefit from the capabilities afforded by such desktop enterprise communications software as presence, directory lookup-and-dial, and voice messaging control, the Executive Mobile module fills the bill and brings various forms of communications and management together in a single, convenient user environment.”

 

Years ago, Zeacom originally developed a call center app running on NEC (News - Alert) IP PBXs, then expanded its capabilities to include functionality apropos to operations outside of a call center, such as operator console, voicemail, and desktop telephony. That in turn evolved into the Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC), now a single complete, integrated system that provides an impressive range of contact center, voice, messaging, presence, and mobility functionality. ZCC works with PBXs from NEC, Cisco and Avaya (News - Alert). The products are sold mostly via OEM agreements and a worldwide reseller network.

 

As an example of how the ZCC has progressed over the years, it can automatically track availability status, based on keyboard and/or mouse activity. Among other things, this means that, two minutes after a person walks away from their desk, their presence icon will change to reflect their change in state. Upon their return, the system updates the person’s status for others to see. Zeacom calls that “rich presence”.

 

Zeacom's ZCC is also capable of what they call “activity presence”. For example, their voicemail component allows you to record up to 99 prerecorded greetings or “presence profiles” that explain you're in a meeting, at lunch, traveling, or various other situations. When you’re about to leave or schedule one of these designated presence states, you click on a list of presence status states, mark its duration, and then presence icons associated with your name will appear worldwide to signal to everyone the fact that you’re in a meeting, or on a plane until a certain time.

 

All in all, Zeacom’s evolution is rapidly accelerating. We in the industry await its next innovation with considerable anticipation.