McGee-Smith Analytics Releases Report Contact Center Applications for Microsoft Lync: A Reseller View of the Market Release
Announcement posted by Zeacom 28 Mar 2012
In this report, McGee-Smith Analytics explored factors driving adoption of Lync and Lync-based contact center solutions. The report looks at issues that might be preventing adoption of Lync-based contact center solutions, reasons why firms are considering adopting a Lync-based solution over more traditional solutions, and predictions on the development of the market for Lync-based solutions over the next two years.
Results from resellers indicate a strong, steadily increasing interest from their customers for Microsoft Lync information and proposals. The familiarity and ubiquity of the Microsoft interface is outpacing traditional vendor attempts to “own” the desktop collaboration experience.
According to Sheila McGee-Smith, who co-authored the report with Karina Howell, “The level of enthusiasm about Microsoft Lync from the resellers with whom we spoke, both traditional and more IT-centric, is noteworthy. Their optimism, we believe, is a function of the positive experience each has had with their first few deployments and the rapidly increasing level of interest being shown by companies in Microsoft Lync.”
Resellers identified enterprise-wide presence, more seamless support for remote and home agents, and instant messaging among the top business goals achieved with contact center applications for Lync.
“Lync can be a way to tap into those knowledge workers who can assist the people in the contact center with things like presence, skills-based search to pull those people in quickly and understand how to find them. We’ve seen instant messaging in contact centers for a long time but not in the rest of the organization. That’s a vision that they have. Lync is definitely an enterprise tool, not a contact center tool,” commented a North American reseller interviewed for this report.
Also of note, is the importance and potential impact of Microsoft Lync Voice.
“We agree with the position stated by the resellers we spoke to that a significant portion of organizations choosing Lync Voice will implement contact center solutions as well, and we expect the contact center attach rate to approach that seen in the enterprise communications as a whole, which is between 35 and 40 percent,” added McGee-Smith. “To the extent that Lync Voice succeeds, so too will contact center applications for Lync.”
Brady Cox, vice president of business development for Zeacom, said, “The emergence and overwhelming demand for Microsoft Lync represents a paradigm shift in the industry from traditional telephony architecture to the need for next-generation, business communications and telephony. As this research demonstrates, the reseller and systems integrators that work with enterprises worldwide will be best-served by embracing this new reality and all that Microsoft Lync has to offer.”
To view findings from this research report, please visit
ABOUT ZEACOM
Zeacom is a leader in communications solutions delivering Multimedia Contact Center, Business Process Automation and plug-in Unified Communications functionality that bring customers closer. Established in 1994, every day more than 4,000 sites rely on our enterprise-class solutions to improve the customer experience, increase productivity and understand their communications workflows.
A managed Independent Software Vendor (ISV) on Microsoft Lync, Zeacom has partnered with NEC for 17 years, is a Cisco Premier Partner and a registered member of the Avaya DevConnect program, with partners and offices in North America, Northern Europe and Asia Pacific.
For more information go to zeacom.com.
About McGee-Smith Analytics
McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, is a leading communications industry analyst firm and strategic consultancy. The firm’s practice focuses on the contact center and enterprise communications markets, and the principle works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises to help them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today's consumer and business customers.