IP Integration is pleased to announce the appointment of Russell Horton, as Chief Information and Technology Officer. He will be responsible for the company’s IT and systems strategy, software development, product management and network billing across the group, which includes its unified communications, contact centre, video and network services practices. Russell has a strong track record of implementing high performance IT strategies within the Telco and IT environments with particular strengths in mobile services, IT software development and project management. His previous roles include Commercial Director for Mobile at Daisy Plc and Group IT & Development Director at Isis Telecom. As well as much experience with mergers and acquisitions, Russell has also led the design and development of customer care and billing platforms that went on to win Telecoms World Billing Solutions awards in 2004, 2005 and 2007.

Joe Prentis, CEO of IP Integration, commented “To achieve our planned growth we need to accelerate our portfolio and services development, especially relating to technologies such as smart devices and cloud based services. Russell’s experience, drive and strategic vision will be key to this, and so he is a welcome and valuable addition to our senior leadership team”.

As part of an ongoing strategy of growth, IP Integration has recruited Simon Longhurst as new Head of Marketing and Business Development, with responsibilities across the group, including its CTI Labs business unit and network services division. Simon was previously with Enghouse Interactive, managing EMEA marketing operations and has also held senior management positions with Crane Telecom (Now Westcon Convergence).

“Simon is an excellent addition to the senior management team, and brings with him a host of experience in the positioning, marketing and sales of unified communications and contact centre technology” said Joe Prentis, CEO of IP Integration. “His arrival is part of our plan to expand our business, which clearly has to include the successful execution of our long term demand generation and marketing strategy,” he added.

IP Integration is pleased to announce the arrival of Richard Pitt, as Group Sales Director. Richard will be responsible for sales across IP Integration, its network services division and software development business unit, CTI Labs. Richard was previously Sales Director at Arc Solutions (part of Enghouse) with previous senior management roles at Avaya, Alcatel and 3Com.

Joe Prentis, CEO of IP Integration, commented, “Having Richard as part of the team provides us with even more strength and structure, and we look forward to working with him to develop and deliver our aggressive sales strategy using his long standing knowledge and expertise of our market.”

Richard’s previous positions have included platforms and applications across both voice and data disciplines, as well as direct and channel based sales model. Richard added, “I am very pleased to be joining the group at what is a pivotal period in its development. I look forward to helping the business achieve its growth plans across its Avaya, Services, connectivity and applications practices, and in doing so ensure that IP Integration remains one of the leading unified communications and contact centre providers in the UK.”

The history books show that it was 600AD when the first fortress was created on the castle rock overlooking Edinburgh. Who would believe that over 1400 years later that such history would co-exist with the latest VoIP communications technology? This is exactly the case with The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo turning to IP Integration to provide them with an Avaya IP Office solution to support their management and contact centre operation providing customer service and ticketing for this world-renowned event.

“We have tremendous pride in the Tattoo and it is vital that nothing lets us down”, commented Colonel Richard Hambleton, Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo Managing Director, “IP Integration’s proven track record of providing mission critical solutions to contact centres provided us with that reassurance and IP Integration has more than delivered on their commitment.”

Following the opening of its London City office earlier this year, IP Integration has launched a programme focused on delivering Smarter Business Communications to London’s medium sized enterprises. This programme looks at how organisations can improve workforce productivity, foster greater collaboration between employees and provide more accessible and better service to their customers.

“Research shows that many organisations do not make the most effective use of their business communications”, stated Dave Glasgow, Sales Director of IP Integration. “This programme is aimed at helping London businesses improve both the productivity of their workforce while working and communicating smarter.”

The senior management team at IP Integration has now been complemented with the arrival of Nicky Bramley as Group Customer Services Director. Nicky has over 20 years’ experience in IT and Telecoms, and has held senior operational positions at Aspect, Avaya and TalkTalk Business.

“I am very excited to be joining a company that has succeeded through its pedigree of technical expertise and customer service excellence, and am looking forward to building on that history by ensuring that IP Integration has the right combination of people, process and technology at its disposal to equip it for a growing future in what is an extremely competitive and fast moving industry”.

Joe Prentis, CEO of IP Integration added, “We are delighted to welcome Nicky on board, and helping IP Integration through the next phase of its development, by ensuring that we continue to employ the best people, and furnish them with the best tools and training in order for us to offer best in class service and support.”

In recognition of the enormous pressure that local authorities, and in particular their contact centres, are under to maintain the quality of the services they deliver while achieving budget savings, IP Integration has launched their ‘Delivering More With Less’ programme. This programme provides core technologies at preferential rates to Local Government and Social Housing Organisations in the area of call classification, self-service, call recording and speech analytics.

“We strongly believe that our contact centre applications can add considerable value to public sector contact centres, enabling them to improve efficiencies while delivering a better service to their citizens”, commented Dave Glasgow, Sales Director at IP Integration. “This programme has been specifically designed to provide these organisations with access to the technology that can enable them to deliver More With Less.”

IP Integration is pleased to announce that they have acquired the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and source code for the Eventra call recording solution. This further extends IP Integration’s comprehensive contact centre solution portfolio with a highly scalable, reliable and commercially flexible recording and quality management solution.

“From our experience we have seen a growing need for recording to expand out of the contact centre into back office functions, to extend beyond telephone calls to capture non-voice interactions, and to have tighter integration into customer management, performance management, self-service and business intelligence applications”, commented Joe Prentis, CEO IP Integration. “Our acquisition of Eventra enables us to achieve this for our customers.”

In less than six months, IP Integration has achieved three quality awards from the British Standards Institution; BSi Quality – ISO 9001:2008, BSi Environmental – ISO 14001:2004 and BSi Information Security – ISO 27001:2005. This success sees IP Integration recognised for its commitment to building a robust, customer focused, profitable organisation that is dedicated to the continuous improvement of its business policies and processes.

Ray Williams, Head of Quality & Programmes, commented on the accomplishment: “There are few companies in the UK that hold three British Standards, especially in the IT/telecoms sector. I am very proud of what the team at IP Integration have done to reach this exceptional standard; these awards strengthen IP Integration’s position as a technology partner that can deliver quality to the needs of its customers.”

Next week at the Hilton on Park Lane, the winners of the Comms National Awards 2010 will be announced. IP Integration is delighted that their solution designed, delivered and support for Claranet is a finalist in the Enterprise Unified Communications category. The project was awarded Enterprise Convergence Solution of the Year at the Comms Business Awards earlier this year. Sponsored by Avaya, the Comms National Awards are regarded as the ‘Oscars of the ICT channel’ and reward excellence in the supply and implementation of innovative comms solutions to end users.

A new partnership launches today at Call Centre Expo that will enable every type and size of contact centre to benefit from speech analytics solutions. The partnership between Aurix and IP Integration will provide the technology platform that was once only accessible to large blue chip companies. Peter Rogers, CEO of Aurix explains, “Partnering with a specialist contact centre systems integrator in the UK to offer this solution enables companies to understand from their customers the best way to expand their businesses, without a huge investment. Putting it simply, the business intelligence obtained from speech analytics can propel a business to the next level.”

At IP Integration’s annual customer summit, three customers presented their story on how they are working with IP Integration and the impressive results that the solutions have delivered. One customer revealed an ROI of less than 12 weeks from deploying CTI Labs’ Classify ME application from IP Integration. The application has enabled this market leading betting and gaming organisation to understand why their customers are calling and make the necessary decisions on how to improve their internal systems and processes to deliver an improved customer experience.

New appointment, Linda Elverson, will drive business development activities around data networking and hosting solutions for IP Integration at a time when a reliable, always-on, secure data network is becoming increasingly critical for organisations. Linda returns to IP Integration after 8 years with over 14 years experience in successfully selling integrated communications solutions to enterprise.

IP Integration has announced a new partnership with UM Labs to resell its SIP Security Controller product. Steve Walker, Managing Director at IP Integration commented; “As a leading solutions provider and systems integrator for Avaya systems we have been investigating and testing several gateways for secure SIP trunk connections. We’re moving ahead with UM Labs because they have a solid product and are able to match our flexibility through their configuration options and their approach to business.”

Organisations looking to record their front and back office customer interactions will now be able to take advantage of the Eventra call recording suite from IP Integration. This cost effective yet comprehensive interaction recording solution provides the capability for end to end reporting and analytics on customer experiences including call recording, screen capture capabilities, quality monitoring, agent coaching and analytics.

IP Integration was crowned Enterprise Convergence Solution of the Year at this years’ Comms Business Awards, securing their reputation as one of the industries leading systems integrators delivering real return of investment for their customers. The award was in recognition of the solution that was delivered to Claranet, the ISP and managed service provider. Steve Walker, Managing Director at IP Integration said it was “testament to the technical competency in outline concept, technical design and delivery supported by the partnership ethos that is core to our values.”

Craig Joseph joins IP Integration as Business Development Director for our growing Network Services business established in 2005. Craig has huge experience commercially in building network services business. While working directly for John Caldwell at Phones 4 U, Craig built a team 340 sales people from the ground up and captured 10% of the UK lines and minutes market. More recently Craig has been involved with instant messaging, VoIP and streaming technologies from a hosting perspective. We are looking forward to Craig’s focus and input in this key technology area.

Ray Williams joins IP Integration as Installations Manager following a number of years developing operations with another leading UK reseller. With 30 years experience in both reseller and product companies in the telecoms arena Ray will focus on the further development of the portfolio, process and skills of the current Professional Services team and delivering excellence in project delivery.

IP Integration appoints Andy Dennahy as Business Development Director. In this new role, Andy will focus on driving application revenues and build on the IP Integration / CTI Labs USP of delivering value through cost-effective, highly-functional, application and integration services. Well known throughout the industry, Andy brings 25 years experience from Periphonics and Nortel and will make an immediate and significant contribution to the development of IP Integration.

Building on our 20% growth in FY’08, IP Integration’s financial year ending September2009 finished with further revenue and profitability growth.

This achievement was against the backdrop of an Enterprise Technology market place declining at around circa 15 – 20% and is a result of our continued investment across the business and continued recruitment to build on this key milestone for our FY2010 aspirations.

The Verint product portfolio is a complex suite of applications in which IP Integration has made considerable investment. This year has seen strong growth in demand for Call Recording solutions and our skills were strongly endorsed by Verint…….

”For the past 5 years IP Integration has led with the Verint & AVAYA OEM solutions. This will have given them an edge over most other Tier One partners. They have skilled up their engineers on the latest product releases from simple compliance recording to enterprise-wide, analytics-driven, Workforce Optimisation solutions.” - Account Director, UK Channels, Verint Systems.

IP Integration wins £750k AVAYA & Extreme tender with a nationwide UK Legal Partnership. This win came with strong competition from the incumbent Telco partner and from Cisco. The joint project teams will now be rolling out Unified Communication applications over the coming months. This opportunity was a direct reflection of the level of focus and knowledge IPI has around the AVAYA and Extreme portfolio. IP Integration today remains one of the very few Partners that have chosen not to offer multiple manufacturer offerings. Instead we focus on developing expertise in best-in-class applications to allow us offer significant value and compelling propositions to our customers.

IP Integration has won Gold level accreditation for the Extreme Product Portfolio with a growing number of large enterprise deployments across the UK. This success is the result of continued investment and training in both product and technical resource across sales, design, delivery and support services. The cost-effective nature of Extreme against Cisco and its Green credentials allowed IP Integration, under the NHS PASA framework, to deliver a multi- site solution totaling £95k for a large Midlands-based government organisation.

"Larger complex contact centre deals provide an opportunity for IPI to excel" said Dave Glasgow, Sales Director, IP Integration, when announcing a significant recent win where IPI beat off BT to win an initial 3 site ACM deal with a multi media contact centre outsourcer. Exploiting IPI’s applications pedigree, the chosen solution incorporated Verint Call Recording and also used CallMedia - specifically for the Multi Media elements. The outsourcer which already operates in 26 countries and is a consistent entrant on The Sunday Times “Fast Track 100”, has deployed the IPI solution to accelerate their business growth.

IP Integration have reached the finals of the Comm's Business Awards in the £100k plus technology innovation category "Enterprise Convergence Solutions" The Comms Business Awards 2009, is the Comms Channel's most acclaimed, credible and well supported event and will take place once again at one of London’s most prestigious hotels – The Royal Lancaster – on the evening of Thursday, 4th June.

"This is recognition for the CTI Labs contact centre applications delivered to Ladbrokes replacing their BT Dealerboard solution where an ROI was achieved in a single afternoon. We are all looking forward to the awards." - Steve Walker, MD IP Integration

"Through our new partnership with Convergys, IP Integration now offers the world’s most sophisticated IVR and speech automation solutions available to our clients, which include retail, the public sector, and the most respected brands in travel and gaming in the UK," said Dave Glasgow, Sales Director, IP Integration. "Convergys' voice response and speech automation solutions deliver the tangible value that meets our clients’ high expectations. Combined with their broader customer care portfolio and the high level of expertise available from our local Convergys team, we fully anticipate a successful long- term partnership."

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IP Integration are working in partnership with The Co-operative to migrate all existing telephone systems to a single IP Telephony infrastructure based upon Avaya Communication Manager. Having successfully tendered for the long term maintenance contract of all of The co-operative's legacy PBXs, IP Integration have begun the process of replacing these with AVAYA Media Servers and Gateways, a collaborative project that could eventually extend to 7,000 extensions across more than 1,000 locations.

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IP Integration subsidiary CTI Labs has had their ME solutions product featured in Comms Business magazine.

"Louie Malatasta, Director of Reading-based CTI Labs, explains the principles behind ME, a new range of communications automation products that opens up a myriad of sales opportunities for the channel."

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IP Integration received recognition at the AVAYA EMEA Business Conference in September 2008 for their expertise with the AVAYA SMB portfolio. Steve Walker, MD of IP Integration, collected "SMB Partner Of The Year" in Madrid from Geoffrey Baird, Global Vice President & General Manager AVAYA SMB. As a valued solutions provider and one of only two UK "Platinum" Business partners across both AVAYA SMB and Enterprise portfolios, IP Integration's growth and ability to successfully integrate applications has been a key in their success.

"We are very pleased to recognise IP Integration in our annual UK awards, they demonstrate many of the great qualities we have in our partner channel, they work collaboratively with our high touch teams, they exhibit strong market traction and customer relationships in key verticals and they have made significant investments in becoming a full portfolio AVAYA partner. This gives them a great range skills to address a broad range of customer applications and offer solutions of true value to these customers."

- AVAYA Vice President EMEA Channels