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Interactive Intelligence Group launched its latest cloud services for enterprise collaboration and communications.
The new PureCloud Collaborate and PureCloud Communicate services offer real-time enterprise collaboration tools, including such as searchable employee profile information, instant messaging, multi-user chat rooms, multi-party video conferencing, and desktop sharing.
Integrated content management offers cloud-based storage and sharing of documents, images and other content both inside and outside the organization for secure team-based collaboration.
“A number of factors have converged to fundamentally change the way employees interact within organizations,” Donald Brown, founder and CEO of Interactive Intelligence, told eWEEK. “Of course, mobility has had a huge influence since fewer people are chained to desks and more employees expect to be able to work productively from smart phones, tablets and laptops. Also, younger employees respond best to modern, consumer-influenced technologies such as chat rooms, video and enterprise social media.”
Also included are Internet protocol public branch exchange (IP PBX) capabilities, including auto-attendant, call recording, speech recognition and unified messaging features.
The platforms also include support for multiple voice, video and mobile endpoints, which works to extend communications and collaboration to any device, including landlines. Remote survivability capabilities provide PBX, IVR, and call recording functionality in the event of lost Internet connectivity.
“We saw a huge need for a cloud-based service that encompassed capabilities that are commonly split across multiple applications,” Brown explained. “PureCloud provides a single source for all the collaboration capabilities that organizations need – instant messaging, chat rooms, audio and video conferencing, screen-sharing, document management, and enterprise social media — all available across mobile devices as well as desktops, and all tightly integrated with critical enterprise systems such as Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint.”
The PureCloud Collaborate and Communicate services will be offered by the vendor’s 350-plus resellers and by its direct sales force. Collaborate is currently generally available as an unlimited free service to an unlimited number of users.
Communicate is expected to be generally available in the second quarter, and will include all Collaborate functionality, and add telephony features such as IP PBX, fax, audio conferencing, remote survivability and other phone features, though pricing has not yet been released.
“Businesses of any size that don’t adopt modern collaboration tools are going to be left behind,” Brown warned. “They’ll have a difficult time attracting and retaining talented employees who increasingly expect access to agile collaboration technologies in order to do their jobs. With PureCloud, making advanced collaboration and communications capabilities available to employees is trivial.”