AFTAs 2018: Best Communications Infrastructure Provider—IPC Systems

This year and for the third year in a row, IPC Systems has won the best communications infrastructure provider category at the AFTAs. Jersey City, NJ-based IPC has done extensive work to make its ubiquitous voice communication platform, Unigy, and its recently unveiled cloud-based ecosystem, Unigy 360, more responsive to the demands of its clients, including additional integration with other offerings to increase workflow efficiencies. 

Don Henderson, senior vice president for product, research and development, and IT at IPC, says the next year will see more voice to data and platform integration. The firm plans to roll out an offering that builds out additional metadata from voice calls and other communications to create information that can be fed into analytics platforms. “We kicked off a data project a year ago and we’re already testing it in beta,” Henderson confirms. “This is our big innovation project for 2019. The project will take the data that our users generate through our ecosystem and convert that usually unstructured data to structured data to derive good intelligence.” 

Henderson adds that voice communication still holds huge importance in the trading world, but the data that can be gathered by it can be unwieldy. With this in mind, IPC wants to ensure that analytics from communications—either from voice or text—can be made more efficient so that clients can derive better information from it to inform their trading or strategies. 

Innovation is important for IPC, says Henderson, which is why the company spent the past few years working on new offerings as well as with other firms. IPC partnered with other voice data services firms like GreenKey Technologies to deliver more value, an initiative that won the best partnership or alliance category in this year’s AFTAs.  

In October 2018, IPC also announced a partnership with business communications provider tekVizion to test out the interoperability of IPC’s platform and security patches. The partnership is expected to deliver upgrades much faster to clients to ensure any security fixes or updates don’t experience glitches in live environments. 

But IPC’s innovative streak has not been limited to new offerings. According to Henderson, one of the company’s largest ongoing projects has been to expand access to Unigy. The company has been working to make using the Unigy platform more fluid between desktops, mobile phones and tablets as well as to other potential access points. Henderson notes that mobility and mobile access is especially important in the Asian and European markets where customers are often on the move. 

IPC will be launching Unigy 360 in the Asia-Pacific region in the first quarter of this year.