Unified Communication as a Platform
Everyone recalls the images of switchboards, cables, and elegant 1950s women routing calls by physically unplugging and re-wiring calls. Switchboards became phone branch exchanges (PBX) and then those systems moved off-premise, and into the Cloud. Today, systems like ShoreTel Sky offer Cloud-based PBX systems that route and transfer calls. When you call a large organization, you actually first call a PBX.
Talking more holistically about calls in the enterprise, namely inbound and outbound calls, as well as workflows and productivity tools to enhance employee efficiency, these systems are called Unified Communication platforms, or UC for short. While many UC players exist, roughly four –Cisco, Avaya, Broadsoft, and Microsoft Lync– account for more than 80 percent market penetration, and between them, they connect to over 250 million endpoints. Cisco alone has more than 60,000,000 endpoints managed by its UC, which means that if you can plug into Cisco's UC, via APIs, then you have access to over 60,000,000 connected desktops. That's a lot of business phones, and one pretty painless integration to get there. UC platforms offer a path to enterprise scalability.
Klink structures and surfaces enterprise data in real time, and does so using the UC platform as its path to scale. By integrating with four partners, Klink will provide real-time data intelligence across these 250 million UC end-points, so that Fortune 1000 companies get more out of their business data, and harness it when it matters most – when employees are on the phone, interacting with live clients.