Top Contact Center Stories of 2014: Page 3 of 14

In February Microsoft held what in hindsight will be its last Lync Conference. In November 2014, Lync was officially re-named Skype for Business, and in May 2015 Lync Conference will be combined with a number of other Microsoft events into Microsoft Ignites, to be held in Chicago.

While contact center application progress into Lync environments remains slow, there have been some notable wins as well. BNSF Railway is one (from the 1995 combination of Burlington Northern and Sante Fe Railroad companies). With a vision of building a 2020 Railroad, BNSF chose to outsource its enterprise telephony, UC and contact center applications to AT&T for its 43,000+ employees. Lync was the UC choice and Genesys – perhaps more free to tightly-integrate with Lync post-ALU sale – for contact center.