Zang, the company Avaya created from its acquisition of Esna in 2015, has announced a significant integration with Mutare, one of their original ISV partners. Mutare, which is located in the Chicago suburb of Rolling Meadows, has integrated the Zang Cloud applications-as-a-service platform into their app Vital Link. The app is aimed at both improving collaboration and satisfying HIPAA compliance regulations.

What makes Vital Link distinct in the market is its ability to transition from non-secure SMS chat to a secure browser when protected health information comes up in a conversation. Entering in a code switches it to a secure browser.

“This means that there is no need to open a new application for secure texting, which saves time, and also keeps patient information protected in compliance with HIPAA requirements,” said Davide Petramala, Zang’s EVP Business Development. “This gave them something very disruptive and unique to go to market with.”

The Zang Cloud’s ability to do text messaging and voice calls efficiently and inexpensively also lets Mutare allow its own customers to scale an application to do mass notifications. Potentially millions of text messages could be sent, at far less than the costs of doing this through a conventional network carrier.

“Mutare is one of the first organizations that adopted our Cloud APIs,” Petramala said. “For them, the beauty was they didn’t have to redevelop anything. They just took the existing code and added our API. This gave them great agility to add functionality to a product they were trying to roll out.”

These ISV partnerships were once the central focus of Zang’s business, and remain an important element today.

“Zang is 100 per cent focused on disruptive collaborative services, and on companies leveraging cloud in every part of their business,” Petramala stated. “We opened up all the APIs in our core stack so developers can have massive ability in building apps, adding our Open REST APIs into the environment that they are building. The only cost is when the app gets used, which limits the risk to the developer. Mutare pays us every time someone sends a message.”

Petramala said that while Zang highlights Mutare because they were one of their first partners, Zang has over 9,000 developer partners.

“Of these, 3500 are active accounts with running applications, and out of those, there are about 90 strategic developers, where we run in the background to drive engagements,” he indicated. “With those strategic ones, we help them figure out the APIs and we are well aware of what they are doing.”

Petramala noted that every week, Zang adds more developers. One that just launched their app built on top of Zang is movietickets.com, which lets you order tickets from anywhere, and pay by texting.

“We are being used in many industries, and many use cases,” he said. “Our goal is to grow that exponentially. That’s the key to success.”

Zang’s ISV business has been complemented since the introduction of two new clouds in February to join the legacy Zang Cloud. Zang Office is Zang’s entry into the cloud PBX market, while Zang Spaces is a cloud-native collaboration tool used to create a persistent team-based collaboration space.

“Our Go-to-market now is all about how we bundle the services together,” Petramala said. “The developers were the original avenue to market, but now we have built others. Zang Office is taking off like crazy. And later in the year we will have Zang Agent, which is a contact centre in the cloud.”