We recently had a chance to talk about unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) trends with Julia McGrath, who is the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Optimum Lightpath, a division of Cablevision Systems Corporation. Optimum Lightpath provides business communications services across the New York metropolitan area, where it recently received its 14th consecutive “Commendation of Excellence” from the New York State Public Service Commission. The company targets “midmarket” businesses, with a special focus on packaged and managed solutions for the healthcare, education, media, government and financial sectors.
BACKGROUND: Optimum Lightpath announces cloud-based phone service
Optimum Lightpath offers a full suite of voice products that include legacy voice options to managed SIP services, but McGrath was upbeat on her company’s progress with its hosted voice portfolio, remarking that the service “has been a real growth engine” and that the “number of users has grown dramatically.” The hosted voice service was initially deployed in January 2009, with upgrades added in the fall of 2011. Earlier this year, the company also added audio conferencing and Web collaboration to its portfolio.
When we asked McGrath what features were UC&C among the most important to her customers, she said the demand for “UC services was starting to pick up the pace. The whole BYOD [brings a] need for features like visual voicemail and document sharing.” She added that “Wi-Fi access and security is also important,” noting that the effect of BYOD in a Wi-Fi environment “is a real issue because of concerns for security and mobile device management.”
McGrath uses a formal feedback from her customers to help decide how to prioritize features and portfolio additions, and when we asked what was next beyond VoIP and UC, she said she’d had “lots of feedback around managed backup,” hinting that there is “more to follow.”
Our observations: While Cablevision isn’t the nation’s largest cable company, it has been a leader among its peers when it comes to innovation, and we have no doubt that McGrath means what she says that there will be “more to follow.”
