Centrinity Flies FirstClass - FirstClass Unified Messaging System - Product Information

Computer Technology Review, July, 2000 by Katherine Diaz

Centrinity, Inc. has begun sending its FirstClass Unified Messaging solution to its FirstClass Gold groupware customers in North America. This is the foremost part in the company's scheduled two-pronged UM marketing strategy-to turn out the messaging solution to FirstClass Gold customers. Adorning FirstClass Gold's current communication and collaboration capabilities, Centrinity has 3.9 million solutions users in North America, of whom 1.5 million are FirstClass Gold users. They now have the choice of an upgrade. Their existing systems can now embody the new product and, in the past two months, the company has already sold the product to two school boards-British Columbia's Richmond School District and the Lester B. Pearson School Board. Its general availability and official launch to new markets is listed for September of this year through systems integrators, telecommunications, and Application Service Providers (ASPs), bearing as licensed technology distribution partners. FirstClass Unified Messaging take s electronic messages. It also combines email. It orders and prioritizes voice. Arranging faxes-anytime, anywhere from any device--Centrinity, Inc.'s messaging solution is identified as a leader in the groupware or Integrated Collaborative Environments (ICE) market with six million users in 8,000 organizations in 55 countries. It contains educational institutions such as Harvard, Emory, and Open University, and commercial customers such as JCPenney, U-Haul, and BBDO Denmark. The total UM market is predicted at $1.4 billion by 2003 (IDC, 1999). It is forced by factors such as the growth in remote messaging and the need to merge single-use applications such as e-mail. Providing the means for functionality and the search by telecommunications providers, cable companies, and Internet Service Providers for differentiators, it extends customers several options.

Myles McGovern, president and CEO at Centrinity, observed: "Centrinity has three advantages that we feel will help us capture a share of this market. The first is our combination of data and voice communications expertise developed over the past decade and already used by thousands of organizations around the world. The second is [the company's] experience in designing software to telephony standards of reliability and, third, unlike UM technologies that give the illusion of unification at the user level, [the solution] is a unified solution with a single repository for all voice, e-mail, and fax messages."