I checked in with LumenVox this morning, after missing them at SpeechTek last month. With all the press that Microsoft and Nuance get (not that I have anything against either), its still nice to know that other speech technology vendors are not only thriving, but really helping niches in the market.

Interactive Intelligence announced their 3.0 release for Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) with lots of new functionality, including integration to Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, and some features to simplify deployment. But the new security features and speech technology function were what caught my eye.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

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.

It’s December. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, plus I’m not a unified communications vendor, so I don’t have a New Year’s resolution list for how I can help further the development of unified communications. I also don’t care to blog about my UC predictions for 2008, as there are plenty of others out there who will probably do that. However, I’m capable of believing in Santa, and as one of my friend’s tells her children when they ask her about Santa - “You have to believe to receive.” So, I thought I would put together my wish list for the Twelve Days of Unified Communications, with some help from my friends in the industry. I talked to a dozen or so vendors on what they would like to see happen in UC in 2008, and whether they had any input as to how they are helping further these wishes. Not surprisingly, in many cases these wishes reflected their own ongoing initiatives or pet peeves (attributions of which I have left off for reasons of anonymity). However, for the most part they tended to have a lot of commonality in what they wish for.

On the Twelfth day of UC the industry gave to me, figuring out the plumbing,
the value of video, not hyping,
no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing,
CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

Darn. It’s Christmas and I woke up this morning and there was no Cisco TelePresence system under the tree. Sigh. I didn’t have any place to put it anyway, so it’s on to the twelfth day of unified communications.

Last week ShoreTel held its first industry analyst conference, in San Francisco. This was a good thing, as the subject of my blog, brand recognition, involves the analyst community too. I’m assuming the majority of my colleagues know who ShoreTel is – a purveyor of VoIP switches, contact center, and unified communications software – but I bet that not many of them previously knew ShoreTel to the depths we went last week. Even I didn’t, although I have to admit I should have as I’m married to a ShoreTel reseller, hear about them all the time, and use their products every day.