“Intermedia” has two distinct meanings depending on what you’re looking for. It is both a cloud communications company that provides phone systems, email, and collaboration tools to businesses, and an art theory concept coined in the 1960s to describe work that falls between established artistic categories. This article covers both so you can zero in on the one you need.
Intermedia the Company
Intermedia is a cloud-based communications provider that sells phone systems, video conferencing, email hosting, contact center software, and security tools to businesses. The company operates in what the tech industry calls the UCaaS space, short for Unified Communications as a Service, which simply means bundling voice calls, messaging, video meetings, and file sharing into one cloud platform instead of buying each tool separately.
Its flagship product, Intermedia Unite, combines a business phone system, team chat and SMS, video conferencing, file management, toll-free calling, and company-wide messaging under a single subscription. Businesses that still run on-premises phone equipment can also use Intermedia’s SIP trunking service, which routes traditional phone lines over the internet to cut costs.
Contact Center and AI Tools
Beyond basic communications, Intermedia sells a contact center product (sometimes labeled CCaaS, or Contact Center as a Service) aimed at companies that handle high volumes of customer calls, emails, or chats. The platform includes omni-channel routing, which lets agents handle phone calls, web chats, and emails from a single screen, plus intelligent routing that sends each inquiry to the right team member based on skills or availability.
Intermedia has been layering AI features across both products. On the contact center side, that includes AI Agent Assist, which surfaces answers and suggestions to agents in real time, AI Supervisor Assist for managers monitoring calls, and AI Interaction Insights that automatically analyze conversations for quality and trends. The unified communications platform has its own AI features as well, branded as AI for Unite.
Email, Productivity, and Security
Intermedia also resells and manages Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including Copilot, and offers its own Exchange-based email hosting for businesses that want a managed mailbox without administering their own servers. Backup services for Microsoft 365 and Outlook round out the productivity suite.
On the security side, the company provides email protection against phishing, malware, and viruses, along with email encryption and an intelligent archiving product designed to store and protect communications data for compliance purposes. These tools are particularly relevant for businesses in regulated industries that need to meet requirements like HIPAA or FINRA.
How Intermedia’s Partner Model Works
One thing that sets Intermedia apart from competitors like RingCentral or Zoom is its white-label reseller program. Rather than selling only under its own name, Intermedia lets managed service providers (MSPs), IT consultants, and telecom resellers rebrand its products and sell them as their own. If your IT provider offers a branded phone system you’ve never heard of, there’s a chance Intermedia is powering it behind the scenes.
The company offers several partnership tiers. The most hands-on is the CORE model (Customer Ownership Reseller), where the partner fully owns the customer relationship. In this arrangement, the partner sets its own pricing, handles billing, and provides first-line technical support, while Intermedia charges a wholesale price and takes care of the underlying voice network, telecom tax compliance, and tier 2 and tier 3 technical support. Partners also get access to a co-branded marketing portal with ready-to-use campaigns and collateral.
Less involved options include a Co-Op model, where Intermedia and the partner share ownership of the customer relationship and the partner earns commissions, and an Advisor model, where Intermedia handles all technical support and simply pays the advisor a referral commission. There is also a Service Provider tier for larger operators who want full control over the customer experience.
Intermedia as an Art Concept
If you arrived here from an art history or theory search, “intermedia” refers to something entirely different. The term was popularized by artist and writer Dick Higgins in a 1965 essay. Higgins was a member of Fluxus, an international network of avant-garde artists, composers, and poets active from the early 1960s onward. He used “intermedia” to describe artworks that exist between traditional categories rather than within them.
A painting that incorporates performance, a poem that functions as a musical score, a sculpture that requires audience participation: these works don’t fit neatly into “painting,” “music,” or “theater.” Higgins argued they occupy the spaces between those disciplines. He described intermedia as a “constant dialectic on as many levels as possible,” meaning the work draws its energy from the tension between categories rather than settling into any one of them.
How It Differs From Mixed Media
Intermedia is often confused with “mixed media” or “multimedia,” and in casual conversation the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The distinction Higgins drew is important, though. Mixed media typically means combining materials within a recognized art form. A collage that uses fabric, newspaper, and paint is mixed media, but it’s still clearly a visual artwork hanging on a wall. Multimedia usually refers to presentations that layer video, sound, and text together.
Intermedia, by contrast, describes work where the fusion of categories creates something that can’t be classified as any single one of them. The piece isn’t “painting plus music.” It’s a new form that lives in the gap between the two. Higgins himself noted he didn’t invent the word. He traced it back to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he gave it a precise theoretical framework that stuck, largely through publications from his own Something Else Press.
The concept remains widely cited in art criticism, performance studies, and new media programs at universities, where courses on intermedia typically explore work that crosses boundaries between digital art, sound, installation, and live performance.