While we were busy making predictions for 2014, we missed covering a few UC news items so today we’ll catch up on three recent announcements from Lightpath, Cisco, and ShoreTel. Lightpath rolled out new voice tools, Cisco acquired a collaboration company, and ShoreTel upgraded its contact center features for the enterprise.
Lightpath, an Ethernet-based communications service provider in the New York metropolitan area, added new features to help mid-market and large businesses communicate more efficiently during emergencies. The latest features are being introduced based on customer feedback about tools that can help improve business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.
The enhancements offer Lightpath Enterprise Voice and Internet Voice Bundle customers access to the PBX CommPortal, so users can remotely change how calls are routed when employees are unable to physically be in an office. Lightpath Hosted Voice customers can also to add mass announce capabilities (to create and send a pre-recorded message to a large number of contacts), and firebar capabilities to quickly establish an emergency audio conference with a group such as a designated crisis team.
In other news, ShoreTel’s latest enterprise contact center software focuses on needs of large customers. ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center 9 uses advanced business logic to define how many and what type of interaction each individual agent can handle.
Commenting in a statement, Pejman Roshan, vice president of product management at ShoreTel said, “Large enterprises in particular are looking for new ways to ensure the highest levels of customer care, and with this latest release, ShoreTel delivers greater support for multi-device, multi-channel interactions that will improve customer satisfaction while providing greater business insights at no additional cost.”
In a separate announcement, Cisco disclosed that it had acquired Collaborate.com to enhance mobility and cloud solutions. Collaborate’s team has created a mobile collaboration application that provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication capabilities, including the ability to create virtual collaboration rooms where they can chat and share documents, notes, photos and videos. Collaborate’s engineers will work as part of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group.