CA Taps Verizon Business for Global Unified Communications and Collaboration Platform

CA—an IT management software company—is transforming its global contact center and enterprise operations via a new unified communications and collaboration solution from Verizon Business.

Verizon Business will deliver an advanced private IP network integrated with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager 6.1 platform to the company’s more than 12,000 employees in 65 locations in 35 countries.

According to Chris Kimm, vice president of solutions engineering at Verizon Business, the deal—despite all its merits and the longstanding relationship between the two companies—was in the works for over two years. 

“It’s been a long time developing,” he says, noting that the initial impetus for the deal was CA’s desire to be more efficient in its contact center business and enterprise voice business and to make its acquisition process as streamlined, cost effective, and easy as possible. 

“It was how can [CA] be more effective and move more quickly and get some efficiencies when [it] makes an acquisition,” Kimm says. “And it was really the fact that we were already a global supplier to them. We could provide the equipment. We could provide the pro services. We could provide the maintenance. We could provide the project management.”

As part of the agreement, Verizon Business will assist CA in optimizing its new IP communications environment to enhance productivity and collaboration across the company’s contact center operations.

The solution also allows CA to become more responsive to customer needs through better leveraging of personnel. Call center agents will be able to “telework”—or work from locations outside the call center, providing CA with increased consistency and employee flexibility.

“They can hire an agent and have them work from any geography in the world,” Kimm says, noting that remote agents are linked into the same technology as agents in the call center. “So [it provides] enormous flexibility.”

Kimm says the solution also provides a significant teleworking dimension on the enterprise side.

“Their goal is to enable people to work anytime from anyplace,” he says. “It’s a productivity play at the end of the day, but…it’s really an employee benefit in many ways.”

The solution also enhances worker mobility and productivity through expedited communications by allowing employees to take advantage of “presence” (the status of an end-user's online or phone availability) and use a variety of communication forms—voice, email, instant messaging, and audio and Web conferencing—depending on the needs of a given situation.

But Kimm contends that, in the end, CA went with Verizon Business because the company could build a global deployment solution.

“The reason that they chose to do this deal with Verizon is the fact that we could execute globally,” Kimm says. “And really at the end of the day it was that assurance that we had the pieces of the puzzle together. And then a long relationship…When you talk  about the kind of relationships that we have with our largest enterprise companies—that’s the way we do business. And it builds a lot of trust.”