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TMCnet Call Center Software Week in Review

By Linda Dobel
TMCnet Contributor

Starting fresh with a full five business days this week after only four days the previous week, the business of contact center software heated up with a number of significant announcements reported by TMCnet.com contributors.

It seemed like good number of pure business transactions, such as acquisitions and hiring, happened this week. For example, TMCnet contributor Carolyn J Dawson broke the news that Zendesk, a leading help-desk software provider on cloud technology, integrated its service with one of the fastest-growing CRM companies, SugarCRM (News - Alert). She said the Zendesk and SugarCRM service should allow customers to flawlessly support agents’ access to the SugarCRM customer information from the Zendesk help desk software, with the reverse also being possible. Quoted in Dawson’s article was Zack Urlocker, COO of Zendesk who said, “In order to provide the best possible service, companies need a holistic understanding of each customer relationship. Zendesk for SugarCRM ensures important details don't get lost between sales and support, so every customer interaction can build on and strengthen the existing relationship."

Zendesk and SugarCRM weren’t the only companies joining each other. Quest Software (News - Alert) announced the acquisition of Symlabs, a privately held solutions provider that specializes in virtual directories and identity management solutions, according to a report from TMCnet contributing editor Anshu Shrivastava. Her report stated that the company believes this acquisition adds strong middleware technology capabilities to the Quest One Identity Solution. With the addition of Symlabs virtual directory software, the company is said to expect that its products will easily consolidate identity data that is stored in the distributed environment.

Business achievement was also noted this week. Meenakshi Shankar, TMCnet contributor, reported that Massachusetts-based software solutions provider Altico Advisors achieved Microsoft (News - Alert) Partner Network Gold Competency in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and a Silver Competency in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). “The credit for achieving dual competencies goes to our team of talented, skilled, and dedicated professionals, who stepped up to the plate and passed all of the exams necessary for this honor,” Mike Kean, president of Altico said in a press release.

Call center software personnel made some individual business moves this week as well. Deepika Mala reported Marketfish, a comprehensive platform for list-based marketing campaigns, has appointed David Fowler, an email marketing veteran, as its first chief privacy officer.

In another appointment announcement, Carolyn J Dawson reported that one of the leading international providers of business software and services to the telecommunications and financial services industries, Elephant Talk Communications, Inc recently announced the appointment of Willem Bekkema as their new manager of Human Resources.

There were also significant new product announcements to report. Pegasystems (News - Alert), a provider of business process management (BPM) and software solutions for customer centricity, announced the newest version of Pega BPM, Anshu Shrivastava, TMCnet contributor reported.

“This latest version brings the company’s ‘industry-leading capabilities’ in a single, unified environment so that organizations don’t face the traditional software pitfalls of multiple points of integration, multiple testing environments, or multiple tools for governance, risk, or compliance,” said Kerim Akgonul, vice president for Product Management at Pegasystems.

Announcing another product debut, Deepika Mala, TMCnet contributor, said HandySoft, a premier global provider of Business Process Management, Tasking and Compliance software and solutions for government and business organizations, has introduced BizFlow version 11.7.The newly announced BizFlow 11.7, she wrote, is directly inspired by customer insights and requests. It provides Social BPM, advanced reporting capabilities, enhanced product integration and support for a mobile workforce. According to the article, “social BPM delivers the benefits of social collaboration through BPM to empower knowledge workers. With the help of support for mobile email, users are able to complete a work item directly from email on their mobile devices.”

Stay tuned to TMCnet all next week to be on top of the latest call center software breaking news.