Intercity's Hull on its device-agnostic UC platform: "We identified a niche"

Why did IT vendor Intercity Technology put £10 million into building its own unified communications platform?

Intercity Technology, an enterprise mobility vendor, has taken the unusual step this year of launching its own unified communications platform. Having invested £10 million into the project, Intercity believes that Touch Technology will disrupt the UC space by providing more features than its competitors in a browser-based application.

We talked to Lee Hull, executive director at Intercity, about the product. The first question, of course, was, "Why?"

Hull: "We identified a niche in the market for a global UC solution that can easily integrate with existing business systems and significantly increase productivity. This is key to business success, and we wanted to enable our customers to work collaboratively and streamline business processes."

He added that what Intercity wanted to provide to its customers didn't already exist, so the company decided to develop its own product. This was not quite as challenging as it sounds; many of the resources were already in place, including tier 3 data centres, a secure operations centre and a network operations centre.

Its lightness is a major selling point of the platform, with no additional resources requires. Phone calls, for example, take up around 100kb of data; the WebRTC function is also described as "very flexible", and minimises usage if connectivity is poor. Hull said that there is no upper limit on the data that the platform can handle.

Because it is browser-based, Touch Technology is portable across different devices and platforms; it can be used in any browser and "virtually any" telephony-enabled device. Intercity operates its own service delivery platform, hosted in multiple data centres worldwide and able to be extended as required.

Touch Technology has a diverse feature set compared to other hosted services. Even its base level provides off-line notifications, video conferencing, call recording and integration with other services like Microsoft Exchange and Salesforce.

We asked why the features of Touch Technology were so wide-ranging; Hull said that they are "designed to empower businesses to change the way [that] they work." He gave a few examples:

"Some of these features include live connectivity dashboards which provide IT managers with insight into their connectivity estate, and we offer audio, video and collaborative tools with a single click on a URL link.

"We also use an open API which allows customers to easily integrate Touch Technology into CRMs, websites and existing systems, as well as our flexible softphone solution, built on WebRTC technology, which enables customers to call directly from a browser.

We aim to continually develop additional features and want to be one step ahead of the market, adapting our technology and features to the way people work - all for a competitive price."

How about privacy?

The IT teams of companies using Touch Technology have access to real-time data on all users' communications in the network; we asked whether any privacy concerns had been expressed to Intercity about this. Hull said, "Touch Technology…has permission-based access control to restrict any access to sensitive data, enabling customers to set their own levels of security to suit their needs and preferences. We also provide an auditable trail to provide insight into who has accessed which pages." He added, "We put security at the heart of everything we do. Our secure operations centre offers 24-hour monitoring to major organisations and household names."

As a solution with a mobile-first component, BYOD is fully supported by Touch Technology: either as an app or through a web browser. Users can switch off at the end of the day with "easily accessible" options (a major concern with BYOD, we have found - the draw to answer ‘just one more email' is always there), and set their own availability as needed.

So far, Touch Technology has been adopted by several global brands; they cannot be named, but include charities and companies in the health, beauty, fitness and lifestyle markets.

Finally, we asked Hull why end users should care about unified communications technology. He said:

"Communication problems can be a massive issue when it comes to productivity - it's a factor that can have a huge impact on a company's bottom line.

With so many people in any given business now working on a range of devices from a range of locations, including internationally, technology that not only enables collaboration, but is flexible and easy to integrate with existing business systems is crucial."