Gold Systems will be exhibiting at the 2011 Lync User Summit June 9th and 10th at the Westin Denver in Westminster, Colorado. This is the second year of the summit and it is the place to be to learn more about Microsoft Lync.
The first summit in 2010 was focused on Office Communications Server and the talk then was all about the upcoming release of the next version of the software. That software of course was Microsoft Lync and it is changing how we communicate. Gold Systems has deployed Lync for many customers and our newest product, Vonetix 7 Voice, is one of the first new products to work with Lync by UC enabling IVR applications for both Microsoft Tellme in the cloud and Lync on the premises.
A few weeks ago I was in Redmond and did an interview with Larry Larsen at Microsoft's Channel 9. It was a lot of fun, and Larry and Kai made it so easy. Larry was interested in how Gold Systems had used Microsoft developer tools and the Microsoft Lync platform to build our new Vonetix 7 Voice product, and he did a great job of capturing the kinds of applications we can build, as well as the tool and platform underneath the applications.
I'm amazed to see that as I write this, the interview has had over 12,000 views and it just went up on four days ago! Wow, thank you Larry, Kai, Albert and everyone else at Microsoft for giving me this opportunity to talk about Gold Systems and our newest product!
2010 was a good year for Gold Systems, and we grew revenue and profits. Now we want to do it again, so we're going to be adding to our sales organization.
We are looking for a Regional Sales Manager for the Great Lakes Region. Besides the usual requirements, (you need to be able to prospect, sell and close business) we're looking for people who fit our culture and have experience in our industry. The ideal person would have sales experience with IVR and speech recognition applications, contact centers, and most importantly a track record of selling with Microsoft and Microsoft partners.
To learn more about Gold Systems, click here. You can submit your resume on the website or if you send it directly to me, I'll get it to the right people.
Dan and I talked about how Microsoft's Office Communications Server can be extended and even embedded into other applications. At the Worldwide Partner Conference this year in New Orleans I was doing a demo of how we had created "Twitter for the Enterprise" using OCS, and on the last day of the conference I recorded this live demo. I was sitting in the U.S. Partner area, which of course included a Starbucks. If you listen carefully you might hear the barista in the background.
Today Unified Communications and Office Communications Server in particular are getting attention because enterprises see the technology as cheaper than buying and maintaining legacy phone systems.
If they get some productivity improvements, which can be tough to quantify, then that's just a bonus. But to me that's like replacing typewriters with PCs in the old days. The future potential of the PC was far more valuable than the incremental costs savings that were gained by improving word processing. The same thing will happen here. Applications of great value will be created that simply aren't possible with today's communications infrastructure that is based on hardware more than software.
Enterprises will not buy phone systems in the future, any more than they buy word processing systems today. Communications of all types, not just voice, will be a part of all of our applications and it will be because today we are rebuilding the infrastructure using software, not silicon and copper wire running to each and every place where we need to communicate.