InterCall Launches Hosted Unified Communications Geared To SMBs

CHICAGO, April 26. InterCall, the world's largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, today announced the launch of InterCall Hosted Unified Communications for the SMB market. The solution delivers the productivity, cost savings and enterprise-class reliability businesses are looking for in a Unified Communications solution, without expensive hardware and infrastructure investments, long and complex deployments or on-going support and upgrade concerns.

"Many small to mid-sized businesses are very interested in Unified Communications from a productivity and cost savings standpoint, but are intimidated by the prospect of hardware expenses, complicated implementations, and day-to-day management requirements," said Bob Wise, executive vice president of Unified Communications Services, InterCall. "This solution provides cost-effective, easy-to-deploy and scalable Unified Communications services that meet the needs of that market."

InterCall Hosted Unified Communications includes central hosting and management of Microsoft Exchange, Office Communicator, SharePoint, Active Directory and Cisco UC Manager. The solution will be bundled with InterCall's award-winning audio conferencing and custom options will be available. As a fully hosted solution, customers can leverage all the benefits of Unified Communications without upfront capital expenditures and no need to hire dedicated on-site staff to maintain the system.

To deliver the offering, InterCall has partnered with CallTower, a leading provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and recognized in Gartner's 2009 UCaaS Magic Quadrant as a visionary in the Unified Communications services market. The combination of InterCall's best-in-class conferencing services along with CallTower's technology platform provides customers with an unparalleled service and support experience, as well as the benefit of having a single vendor to manage and a single invoice for their monthly communications spend.

"We were wholly impressed by InterCall's Unified Communications vision," said Bob Barnes, executive vice president of sales, marketing and business development at CallTower. "Their long history of success, their ability and desire to find the best available partners, and their commitment to bring them to market in an integrated fashion is what makes us strongly believe in the partnership."InterCall customers will also have access to expert technology consultants, thanks to the recent acquisition of SKT Business Communication Solutions by West Corporation (InterCall and SKT BCS are a part of West Corporation). SKT BCS is a leading professional services, systems integration and information technology firm specializing in the consulting, project management and implementation of Unified Communications and IP telephony, legacy telecommunications systems, virtualization and Communications Enabled Business Processes.

Both the CallTower partnership and SKT relationship are key pieces of InterCall's Unified Communications strategy, reflecting the transition from being the world's largest conferencing provider to becoming the leading provider of collaborative business solutions.

"We've built our services out of the desire to meet customer needs, so our move from being the number one conferencing provider to the number one collaboration provider is a natural transition that reflects where the market is going," stated Wise. "This partnership will ensure our continued delivery of best-of-breed services and easy-to-use solutions."