I recently had the chance to speak with Joe Staples, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert), the Indianapolis-based provider of unified business communications solutions. (The podcast is available online.)

 

We discussed a number of things, including the company’s recently launched business communications blog, which he hopes will serve as a resource to provide insight into the contact center, enterprise IP telephony, and enterprise messaging markets.

 

The blog — which will not be written by a single author, but rather by a group of market specialists that Interactive Intelligence is calling “The Blog Crew” — includes categories for “Best Practices,” “Contact Center,” “Enterprise IP Telephony,” “Enterprise Messaging,” “Market Trends and News,” and “Tech-speak.”

 

The Interactive Intelligence “Insights into Unified IP Business Communications” blog can be found online at http://www.inin.com/Blog/Default.aspx.

 

Staples also addressed Interactive Intelligence’s relationship with IBM (News - Alert) and their Lotus/Sametime group.

 

“We’re working on an integration between our CIC product and Lotus Sametime,” Staples said “What this will provide is for those customers that run Sametime and choose to run CIC either in their enterprise or contact center or both, then those Sametime users can communicate with CIC users.”

 

Expanding on the integration, Staples added, “The solution will provide synchronized presence between Sametime and CIC, it will provide a companywide directory encompassing all CIC and Sametime users, and the solution will provide the added functionality that both products bring. Interactive Intelligence will bring the IP telephony and contact center functionality that Sametime doesn’t have, and Sametime will offer collaboration, chat and video to the overall environment through this integration.”

 

Staples expects this partnership to come to fruition in the second quarter of this year.

 

We also discussed the work Interactive Intelligence is doing with regard to what they’re calling Communications-Based Process Automation. The company will offer a solution called Interaction Process Automation, which is designed to essentially take the functionality that handles interactions in a contact center that has been built into CIC over the last decade, and apply those tools to the automation of business processes.

 

The idea is to offer organizations the ability to move beyond simple unified communications (UC) and to leverage technology to have a quantifiable effect on their business.

 

As Staples said, “We see this as the ‘hard ROI’ that UC has been looking for. A lot of UC has revolved around personal productivity and other ‘soft ROI’ that has been tough for a CFO to quantify.”

 

To hear the podcast, to view an alternate feed of the Insights into Unified IP Business Communications blog, or to stay up to speed on the latest news driving the contact center market, visit the Contact Center Solutions global online community.