Kurmi’s focus is on enterprise UC provisioning and the new version of the suite extends support for Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft.
Kurmi Software, a French-based UC provisioning software provider, which now has a majority of their sales in North America, has released Kurmi Provisioning Suite Version 7.8. It includes a series of enhancements for users on the Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft platforms.
Kurmi was spun out of a French company about ten years ago that was making very complex projects. Kurmi’s business is around UC provisioning. Small and medium sized companies don’t invest in this, but large companies do. Kurmi is squarely targeted at that kind of space.
Kurmi’s focus was initially mainly on the French market, but they have been selling in the U.S. for five years, and today it makes up a majority of their sales, selling mainly to very large enterprises.
Micah Singer, Kurmi’s CEO
“The company now has about 60 people in France, and 50 in North America, and is primarily growing in North America,” said Micah Singer, Kurmi’s CEO. “We are still something of a hidden French company in North America, and we get a lot of business when companies find out about us and take us to their partners. We have done very well in the largest of enterprises like the Fortune 500.”
Their biggest competitor is do-it-yourself efforts from enterprise IT, although they have competitors like Acadian Labs and Starfish in the service management space as well.
“Our flexibility is a major factor in helping us win deals,” Singer stated. “French technology is often overengineered, but that also means that it can be customized in so many ways, which is really impressive.”
Singer, who has only been CEO for eight weeks, although he has been a board member for two and a half years, does not come from a channel background, but the channel is important to the company.
“I was hired because I really understand this technology and its marketing,” he said. “I sold my last company to Cisco. The channel is new to me though. We have about 60 active channel members, many of us who came in after large customers found us on their own and brought them in. We have both straight commercial relationships and where possible, hands-on assistance, although the latter is the goal.”
The Kurmi Provisioning Suite Version 7.8. contains features to enhance management of unified communications services for users on Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft platforms. It is generally available now to all Kurmi Software’s enterprise, channel, and service provider partners.
“Half of our company is involved in R&D, so we have been making advances on a lot of fronts at the same time,” Singer indicated.
The Microsoft enhancements include a Graph API connector which has been added to Kurmi’s existing Microsoft PowerShell connector.
“We are going deeper into Microsoft Graph API because they are starting to replace PowerShell,” Singer said.
Microsoft Teams comprehensive provisioning has been extended to include Emergency Location of user groups to Azure Active Directory. This is a response to new regulatory requirements.
“The Emergency Locators for Microsoft are now law, because you have to be able to find people within a business,” Singer noted. “Microsoft added this to Teams, but it’s tricky to use.”
Cisco enhancements include organization-wide management of Cisco Webex Calling Multi-Tenant, an essential function for managed service providers.
“We have started to support Webex Multi-Tenant, which is a competitor to Microsoft Teams,” Singer said. “A lot of our customers are starting to use it, and this enables us to do the migration for these large numbers of tenants.”
Kurmi has also extended the scope of HCS, CUCM, IM&P and UCCX integration connectors with simplified features for management of Cisco Unity Caller Input and CUCM Intercom Route Partition as well as CCS.
“With Avaya, we have upgraded support for messaging and contact centre environments,” Singer indicated. This includes a simplified ‘single pane of glass’ interface for management of these Avaya Unified Communications and Contact Center environments. Kurmi also now supports Avaya Messaging, previously known as Avaya IX Messaging.
