CallTower

Award Description
The Frost & Sullivan Award for Technology Innovation is presented to the company that has demonstrated technological superiority within its industry. This Award recognizes the ability of the company to successfully develop and introduce new technology, formulate a well-designed product family, and make significant product performance contributions to the industry.

2006 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Technology Innovation Award Recipient: CallTower

While Cisco and Microsoft have gained much attention for their efforts to integrate realtime communication capabilities, CallTower quietly rolled out its Live Communications Management Suite, for which Frost & Sullivan recognizes its achievement with its 2006 Award for Technology Innovation. CallTower beat the two market leaders in their respective spaces with its own communication and collaboration solution that includes both the CallManager and LCS 2005, introduced in April 2006. Any CallTower customer that also has Microsoft Exchange can be assured of interoperability without having to purchase multiple licenses from Cisco and Microsoft. The customers benefit from being able to take advantage of such applications as collaboration without the need to purchase any additional hardware.

CallTower's customer base consists primarily of smaller businesses with perhaps 75-to-200 employees although it is also moving up-market and the solution is scalable. It is also moving up in terms of applications available in the Live Communications Management Suite and will continue to do so with Caller Digital Assistant, telephony presence, click-to-conference, caller ID pop-up and the to phone tag. Caller Digital Assistant prompts customers to announce their name before the call is handled. There is also a mobile component through which customers can connect to their office phone system while at a remote location with WiFi or other broadband connectivity. Installation takes 45 days or less and with the CallTower offering, end users will be able to take advantage of services that are only promised by Microsoft and Cisco today.

The CallTower Live Communications Management Suite is the first hosted service and solution that combines "presence management" with the phone system. This telepresence provides information on whether a contact is on the phone thereby increasing productivity and realtime communication by determining who is available for communication rather than emailing or playing "phone tag." Customers are already familiar with Office applications and these can be easily integrated into one's telephony applications. CallTower is the first provider to offer a solution that includes both Cisco's Call Manager and Microsoft's Live Communications server. Customers can purchase or lease equipment from Cisco and CallTower will do remote monitoring. One of the primary benefits of the integration is the ability to build applications. Moreover, customers are not required to purchase licenses from Cisco and Microsoft nor worry about integration. Customers are able to leverage Microsoft's presence information and do call control from a PC. CallTower stresses that this integration offers greater reliability and QoS than a softswitch-based platform and increased functionality.

IV. Summary of Best Practices

CallTower beat Cisco and Microsoft to the market; the two companies are working on a joint solution for the Call Manager and LCS, which should be available by the end of 2006. As first-to-market with the features, CallTower will be able to continue to differentiate itself from its competitors and in the future will be able to add applications. CallTower is helping its customers to experience the benefits of IP telephony and consequently is eliminating any misperceptions regarding to IP telephony as a low-end service, lacking in functionality.

It is in recognition of its forward-looking thinking, time to market and ease-of-use that Frost & Sullivan presents this Technology Innovation award to CallTower.