In the weeks leading up to VoiceCon, many vendors have been having pre-briefings with the UCStrategies.com team to tell us about their VoiceCon announcements. I’ve been following Zeacom for quite a while and was pleased to hear from them about their latest announcement, which positions them as a significant player in the UC space. For those of you who may not be as familiar with Zeacom, the company focuses on SMBs, especially mid-sized companies that have both contact center and communication management needs. Rather than taking an enterprise product and trying to fit it to the SMB market, Zeacom has developed its products and solutions specifically for SMB customers.

I’ve always been impressed with some of the unique features of their products, especially the personalized call greetings functionality, which plays a special greeting recorded especially for specific callers. For example, when I call “John Smith” at Zeacom, the system identifies my phone number and plays a personalized greeting that John recorded just for me, and also provides me with pre-selected options in order to contact John. The system knows whether to use the “find me/follow me” capabilities and try to locate the individual being called, or to send the call to voice mail or transfer it to another individual, based on the rules set up by the user. It helps users better manage their communications, allowing them to be contacted and interrupted only by those people who they want to talk to (i.e.; boss or spouse), while sending other calls (i.e.; credit collectors or annoying customer) to voice mail or to someone else in the company. It’s totally personalized by each user and very cool.

Like some other companies, Zeacom has been offering both contact center and UC solutions for years. But what’s different is that Zeacom’s offerings are based on the same code base and reside on the same platform. Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) is a single UC solution based on Zeacom’s two flagship products, Contact Center and Corus (offering CTI call control, UM, etc.), supporting up to 2500 desktops and 5-500 contact center agents. ZCC brings together Unified Messaging, rich presence, desktop telephony, mobility, contact center, and operator console applications all in the one application. With ZCC, Zeacom promotes the  concept of 1+1+1, meaning that there is one appliance, one application and one administrator/reporting environment. In other words, simplification for customers.

The big announcement at VoiceCon is ZCC version 5, which introduces new sets of UC features, including Microsoft OCS interoperability; Executive Conferencing, including up to 64 participants with a simple ’drag and drop’ capability (audio conferencing only); Intelligent Mobility to provide seamless transference between UC applications on the mobile and the desktop; Lotus Notes unified messaging to integrate with the Lotus inbox (Outlook integration has been available for years); and Easy Dial for making calls by clicking on phone numbers in the user’s browser or Microsoft documents.

Given the rise in mobile workers and the need for better tools to help them be more productive when away from the office, ZCC’s Intelligent Mobility is one of the more impressive features. Intelligent Mobility provides mobile access to all ZCC functionality and desktop features (including presence, profiles and company directory). ZCC can detect whether you’re at your desk, and if not it will then automatically route calls to your mobile device. Selected priority callers can be directed to the user’s mobile device, while others are transferred to voice mailbox.

And not to be left out, ZCC offers OCS integration, but also enhances key OCS functionality with ZCC’s own click-to-dial, rich presence, mobility, conferencing, and other telephony functions. Users can select either the Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) client or the ZCC desktop client to view presence or availability status of colleagues, and to initiate functions such as click-to-call, chat, or IM. I expect most OCS customers will use the MOC client since Microsoft generally “owns the desktop,” but it’s nice to have a choice.

There are certainly other vendors offering UC/contact center solutions for the SMB market, but the majority of these are scaled down versions of the vendors’ enterprise products – often called “lite” or “express” products. Zeacom takes a different approach and has developed its products specifically for the SMB market from day one, focusing on the specific needs of small- and mid-sized companies.

Of course Zeacom’s solutions aren’t for everyone – as far as I know the company has no plans to expand to the larger enterprise, and its offerings are really aimed at mid-sized companies. And the company still has to build up its channel and go-to-market partners, as well as raise market awareness in North America. But I’ll be keeping my eyes on them for a while.