“We offer Unified Communication as a Service for SMBs”

Please mention the unique technology by which you are helping organizations and enhancing efficiencies?

Companies in India are making a gradual move from on-premise legacy to different forms of cloud, according to IDC. More money is coming from services (including open source for standards) than products in cloud computing.

IT in an organisation is no longer a support function; it is a lever to achieve business goals. And cloud is the technology that is helping organisations realise quantifiable benefits. While on-premise legacy is still the dominant form of IT, the share of cloud services is only increasing while still largely limited to ad-hoc projects. Among cloud services, while highest deployments are in public cloud it has its fair share of concerns in security and vendor lock-in. Thus, organisations are increasingly looking at ways to deploy cloud on on-premise, hosted and virtual private clouds.

What makes InterCall different from other unified communications (UC )vendors is that it offers UC solutions that can help drive customers’ key business outcomes.  InterCall spends a lot of time with its customers during the consultation phase, talking with the clients on the specific business objectives that they want to achieve through their UC solution. InterCall’s approach to clients is to leverage its existing solutions in creating an integrated solution that would help them achieve their business targets. They do not force clients to get rid of their existing solutions, but instead look at ways on how these can be integrated into new solutions to help clients achieve their business goals.

Not only do InterCall’s unified communications applications bring productivity improvements for mobile employees, they can also favorably change ways in which all employees communicate as well as reduce the necessity of travel and promoting shorter project cycles. With a global footprint and broad service capabilities our flexible models, managed and on-premises communication services has helped companies in India get the most out of their business processes.

Please mention about the history of your firm and what made you address the gaps in the existing conferencing technology? 

When InterCall was founded in the early 1990s, landline phone capabilities were limited. InterCall began delivering conferencing platforms, connecting three or more people to a single call as the work-from-home movement and wireless boom expanded the numbers of remote workers and the need for conferencing; however, conferencing services were not yet widely used.

The dot-com era provided a welcome bump in awareness and usage. InterCall was at the forefront, debuting reservationless audio conferencing in 1999 and web conferencing in 2000.

Conferencing changed forever on September 11, 2001. Businesses across the world turned to conferencing when they were unable or unwilling to travel. Companies found they could be productive without the fear or inconvenience of post-9/11 travel. As the travel industry recovered despite this it continued to grow.

The reason for the industry’s continued growth is simple: workers are becoming more mobile and companies continue to look for easier ways to get more done. Conferencing providers help businesses achieve both. The next frontier for collaboration lies in solutions that deliver services such as conferencing, email, messaging and voice from one central location.

InterCall and our parent company, West Corporation- embraced this change and worked towards innovation every day. Through acquisitions, product development and strategic partnerships, InterCall and West corporation have become leading contenders in the Unified Communications (UC) space. This is also in line with InterCall’s commitment to provide solutions that will help customers achieve desired business outcomes.

What is your perception about the use of conferencing in Indian organizations as compared to the international circuit? What is India’s adoption rate in comparison?

Conferencing and collaboration is a significant growth industry in India. The growing appetite of customers, opening up of new age verticals and the growing adoption of technology in the older industries will help propel growth in this space. For example, in the past IT and ITES, BFSI and Pharma sectors have been the largest consumers of our products and services. We are now beginning to see success with our customers in the manufacturing, and engineering space too. We will penetrate these industries and help open up other industries too, by selling the value proposition to the non early adopters of technology.

Cloud crossed the inflexion point in 2012. Business use cases especially in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) areas provide testimony to that. India represents a key growth market for us. We have established strong presence in the top cities in India and we are now looking in to other cities too along with appropriate delivery models.

West Incorporation is our parent company and they have a broad range of products and services apart from what we currently take to market in India. We intend to carry out customer studies to determine interest and introduce those that make us more relevant. Our focus this year will be towards strengthening our partner model. Along with providing best in class infrastructure, we also focus a lot on the other ‘I’, which is interface. Understanding that our customers today who have a fairly young working age population and given the desire of these customer’s staff to have relevant, cool and special apps that help them collaborate easily, providing a sleek and well-designed interface is a big motivator for us. Through our focus in these areas, we strongly believe we will continue to outpace the industry growth like we have done in the past. This will further help us solidify and expand our market share in India.

Our customer’s patronage has allowed InterCall to be successful in India for a decade now and we are here for good. InterCall acts as the one stop shop for all our customer needs. We have are an extremely skilled organisation with a team which is able to talk to and convince CXOs.

How are you aiding the SMB market and playing a key role in addressing their challenges?

We provide them a solution that is appropriate to their requirements, this cloud-based solution enables SMBs to deploy a unified communication strategy without investing capital in on-site hardware or budgeting for continual operational expenses, since the third-party provider supplies, manages and hosts the required infrastructure. Cloud-based applications are appropriate for start-ups due to the solutions’ flexibility and scalability. A start-up can grow quickly but at the same time, it also needs to maintain lean operations. SMBs with multiple office locations prefer cloud-based solutions as they can be rolled out easily and are supported by the cloud provider’s IT services.

SMBs that choose UCaaS for their communication needs avoid the capital outlay required to set up and maintain on-site hardware, instead shifting that cost to the third-party UCaaS provider.

The UCaaS models allows to quickly and easily increase service levels as they add employees rather than forcing them to predict their needs in advance.

SMBs that lose communication capabilities during weather events or other disasters need to re-establish those systems as quickly as possible. We ensure that they never lose their communications systems in the first place, since employees can access the off-site cloud-based tools from any location.