ChannelVision Sept-Oct 2017

The appointments follow a second round of equity funding secured earlier this year. David Matthieson joined Virsae as a customer success manager for the North American market. He has worked for Avaya, Arrow SI and Con- vergeOne. Also in the U.S., Raymond Pearson has been appointed channel account manager, and comes with 20- year track record in communications consulting. On the other side of the Atlantic, London-based Geoff Weeks has been appointed customer success manager for the U.K. and EMEA, hav- ing worked for U.K. Avaya integrators Centrix, and AdEPT Telecom. And finally, Michelle Lorenz joins Virsae in the newly created position of development manager. Lorenz recently returned to New Zealand from Norway, where she headed up the global operations department of a large-scale SaaS company serving Europe and the U.S. Virsae CEO Tony Jayne said the new appointments will enhance in- country resources and ensure Virsae continues to develop channel support and sales momentum. The firm’s recur- ring revenue grew by 88 percent over the 2016/2017 financial year. PCCW Global has launched Res- toration On Demand, a network-as- a-service offering that lets customers re-route their connections to an alter- nate network path in the event of an undersea cable failure, thereby restor- ing their international connectivity at the click of a button. The service relies on the compa- ny’s software-defined network (SDN) capabilities, and complements PCCW Global’s existing premium always-on protected International Private Lease Circuit (IPLC) service. Link setup, traffic restoration and billing are automatically activated. Once the primary circuit has been repaired, the customer can elect when to revert to the original service. Customers can place orders direct- ly via the PCCW Global Service Portal and the service is activated in min- utes, the company said. The service is charged on a daily-usage basis. Five9 Targets Multinationals Five9 has launched the latest version of its Virtual Contact Center (VCC), with additional features for multinationals. It offers an omnichannel solution with a ho- listic view of a customer’s journey across all touchpoints, intelligently distributing interactions to the right agent regardless of location, said the company. Five9 delivers this on a modular micro- services-based architecture, which modu- larizes existing applications such as voice, email, chat, social, event services, DTMF, text-to-speech, voice prompts, voice re- cording, answering machine detection, speech recognition and customer journey analytics, in addition to the list of previous- ly available modules, which include app services, stream services, state manage- ment and others. Other features include global voice, global routing, language lo- calization and UTF-8 support, and integra- tions with Salesforce Lightning Experience and Microsoft Skype for Business. “Today’s release allows us to serve large enterprises with globally distributed contact centers on a scalable cloud plat- form,” said Mike Burkland, president and CEO at Five9. “[A]s always with Five9, no infrastructure to deploy or manage, scale up or down, now with any language and the ability to on-board thousands of agents globally as needed.” V irsae has made four key appointments, designed to boost sales of its cloud-based unified communications (UC) service management platform, VSM, for resellers in the U.S. and U.K. Virsae Beefs Up U.S., U.K. Channel Team International Agents PCCW Global Launches Restoration on Demand Annual growth in submarine cable capacity from 2007 to 2015, based on data submitted to the FCC. Capacity is projected to grow 17% per year from year-end 2015 to year-end 2017. The FCC revealed that the total available capacity of U.S. international cables grew in 2015 to approximately 120,000 Gbps circuits, up from 91,000 Gbps circuits in 2014. 35% Channel Vision | September - October, 2017 44