CoreDial plans to offer ConnectWise Manage through its flagship SwitchConnex platform — with the goal of streamlining partner business processes.

The new integration allows CoreDial partners to use the customer relationship management (CRM) abilities of ConnectWise Manage professional services automation software used by MSPs in the telecom and IT support industries. ConnectWise Manage integrates business process automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management and business analytics.

At last week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo, Caitlin Clark-Zigmond, CoreDial’s vice president of product management, told us this is a busy time for her company, which has more than 620 partners, more than 300,000 users and more than 20,000 customers.

“As we roll through this year, we’ll be enhancing our call recording engine in the third quarter, and also … the mobile apps that we have will be available on both Asterisk and BroadWorks,” she said. “So we have Asterisk today and in the July-August timeframe they’ll be available on the BroadWorks side as well. So we have a lot going on.”

Also in the third quarter, CoreDial plans to launch a new bimodal UC client that will work on Asterisk and BroadWorks, Clark-Zigmond said.

“The nice thing about it, besides being white-labeled for the partner, it’s also built for them so they can actually manage all of their customers,” she said. “As simply as you or I could look up our contacts, they can look up their customers and interact with them as well. So it’s really nice for them to be able to see presence and answer billing questions or do different things in a much faster manner, as well as servicing business customers and the needs that they have as those millennials and others continue to join the workforce and want more collaboration tools.”{ad}

Numerous factors are driving the need for rapid innovation and faster rollout of new offerings, Clark-Zigmond said.

“For one, in this space … conferencing, hosted PBX, contact center, the file sharing and all these worlds are collapsing on one another, and we have the technologies in the cloud services today to really put a nicer wrapper — so it’s not five different things, but really one thing that you can use and stay focused,” she said. “Also, if you look at the millennials and a lot of the Generation Z coming in, there’s a constant stream of their personal lives and their work lives – there’s less separation – so they really want a tool that they can quickly chat with, and then video with their friends as well and then move on to the next conference call.”

Another driver is the need for mobility and people wanting to work from anywhere, Clark-Zigmond said.

“There’s less need for a lot of that brick and mortar, and in doing that you need safe, secure ways of accessing your business information, and then you want it efficiently and effectively brought to you so you don’t have to be hunting through tons of information,” she said. “Even a small increment of efficiency goes a long way.”