I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dimension Data at the Cisco Unified Communications Summit in Toronto in September. Dimension Data, founded in 1983 and headquartered in South Africa, is an IT services and solutions provider with vast expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage, and contact center technologies. They aren’t your typical systems integrator/VAR outfit either. They are huge; managing over $12B in network infrastructure around the globe. In fact, they have built out over 2000 IP networks in just the last three years, and are heavily into unified communications. They are also a Gold partner for both Cisco and Microsoft on five continents, and just recently received a Cisco Master Unified Communications Specialization designation.

In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.