Across the enterprise communications space, there has been a fair amount of consolidation over the past few years. Some combinations were large (e.g., Avaya and Nortel or Mitel and Aastra) and others were smaller. In the contact center market, one company has made a series of these smaller acquisitions in the past ten years: Enghouse Interactive of Toronto, Canada.
Beginning with Syntellect in 2002 and quickly followed by Teloquent in 2004 and Apropos in 2005, Enghouse acquired contact center companies that had a solid--and happy--customer base but were struggling to compete with the bigger players in the market. Sometimes the firms had solutions specific to geographic markets, like Trio in 2009 (Nordics), or to specific user profiles, as was the case with Arc Solutions (attendant consoles) in 2010.
In 2012, when Enghouse acquired Zeacom, it signaled that it was making a play for the Microsoft Lync market. Zeacom had one of the first Lync-compatible contact center solutions, and Enghouse's Trio application was also certified as Lync-compliant that year. But while Microsoft continues to gain share in the enterprise communications space, contact center deployments on top of Microsoft Lync are still low in number. The company's press release in March 2014, which detailed that it has had 99 Lync deployments in the past 18 months, may be an interesting milestone but doesn't exactly describe a market on fire.
In a meeting at Enteprise Connect, Ernie Wallerstein (former Zeacom head of North America, now President Enghouse Channels) presented a new consolidated view of the Enghouse Interactive contact center portfolio. As of April 1, 2014 the former Zeacom Communications Center has been rebranded Enghouse Interactive Communications Center. As shown in the graphic, it is being combined with the assets of other Enghouse acquisitions as well as internally developed solutions, to create a more complete customer experience suite. The integrated portfolio includes:
• Zeacom's contact center application
• An internally-developed recording solution, QMS
• KMS, a knowledge management solution from the acquisition of Safeharbour
• Predictive dialing from the acquisition of IAT
• Operator console functionality (Arc and Datapulse assets)
The solutions are brought together with a new user interface: low-footprint, context-sensitive, extensible, analytics and collaboration-focused. Initially released in October 2013 for voice calls, the new agent and supervisor client will be available to support full multi-channel centers later this month. Also planned is support for multiple languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, and Chinese, targeting new markets in Latin America, French Canada, Europe, and China.
While deployment in Lync environments is still a key strategy for Enghouse Interactive, Wallerstein acknowledges that much of the company's contact center business comes from sales on other platforms, e.g., Avaya, Cisco and NEC. The integrated portfolio story, along with the new user interface, will be attractive in all of those markets.
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