Global Communications Leaders Join Forces to Clear UC Interoperability Hurdles

The movement to respond assertively to an industry challenge that has hindered widespread unified communications adoption recently took a bold step forward. The newly formed Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) alliance of key technology leaders represents an organized, intensified focus on enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications interoperability. With an expanding roster of supporting member companies, the potential for change is reaching critical mass.

Corporate IT leaders and others responsible for new technology investments have had many reasons to put new infrastructure expenditures on hold. Budget dollars have simply been too scarce in the lean economy of the past two years to overlook interoperability concerns. But just as companies’ interest in unified communications’ potential to improve productivity and efficiencies has grown, so has their restlessness for access to the business value of the technology’s capabilities.

The UCIF promises to help the industry break free of lingering restraints. The alliance is pursuing an agenda that will benefit both customers and vendors. By identifying common customer scenarios and leveraging existing industry standards, they’ll be able to resolve interoperability issues that have slowed the momentum of adoption and deployment of unified communications. UCIF members will also benefit from simpler, more cost-effective multi-lateral testing capabilities that replace ad hoc interoperability testing.

As a company that holds a long-standing position that strongly favors developing solutions using standards-based technology, Aspect welcomed the opportunity to join UCIF. Actively working with other like-minded members, we expect to play a continuing role in helping customers fully leverage unified communications through application integration. Our ultimate goal is to help focus our customers’ efforts on deploying new technology that will deliver the greatest benefits, without investing valuable budget and resources in making technology interoperate. With the collective efforts of UCIF members, the market will benefit from faster availability of interoperable UC solutions.

How can your organization benefit from UCIF efforts?

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Technology Considerations for the Avaya Roadmap

Author: Mike Ely, Director of System Architecture

Since Avaya/Nortel announced their product roadmap, it has given both key stakeholders and the market the opportunity to step back and examine what this means for their businesses. While there are myriad technological implications now and in the future, following is the Aspect perspective on a few of the issues that seem of greatest interest based on market feedback.

SIP – Businesses have long known the importance of session initiation protocol (SIP), which Avaya now is embracing, too. SIP brings dynamic capabilities that Aspect has long recognized as essential to elevating the customer experience.  SIP reduces complexities across your contact center by delivering a common protocol that connects all the people, processes, systems, and applications that support the communications infrastructure.  In doing so, it increases flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and opens the gate to a whole host of new applications that can help to enhance agent productivity and improve customer service, while at the same time allowing retention of existing infrastructure investments.

The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.  

Unified Communications and Collaboration – Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform?  In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides.  They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.

What are your thoughts about the future of the Avaya roadmap?  Are there other important technology considerations?

Mike Ely is the director of system architecture at Aspect. Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center.  For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC. 

Other opinions on the Avaya/Nortel roadmap can be found:

• Phone Plus – http://www.phoneplusmag.com/hotnews/avaya-nortel-integration-reaction-mixed.html
• DestinationCRM – http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240016122/Avaya-Nortel-roadmap-shows-no-clear-path-to-UC-in-the-contact-center

UC Strategies – http://www.ucstrategies.com/in-the-spotlight/our-views-on-the-avaya-nortel-roadmap.aspx

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Impressing the Boss is Always a Good Thing

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

There are certain infrastructure upgrades and decisions that you need to consider as you develop your unified communications (UC) strategy. One of the biggies is the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking.

For Aspect, SIP Trunking was a no brainer. Our company was looking at Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 as a way to consolidate some of our unwieldy technology and streamline processes, but we were also extremely focused on potential cost savings. SIP Trunking was a logical way for us to take significant costs out of our telecommunications activities.

To us, one of the really appealing elements of SIP Trunking was that it enabled Aspect to completely consolidate our voice infrastructure and still look “local” when our infrastructure was really thousands of miles away.  This is resulting in a much more efficient use of capacity.  And, in doing so, we have been able to get rid of lots of hardware (which as you know is expensive to maintain), as well approximately 70 percent of our separate voice, video and data connections at remote sites.  I love the idea that we only need to manage one WAN connection for each of our sites, instead of various voice, video and data circuits.

And, my boss (our CEO) is pretty psyched about the fact that Aspect has seen a significant drop in local and long distance costs because of reduced number of circuits and better usage rates as a result of our use of SIP Trunking. We expect this to amount to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the next several months and years.

In addition, with all of the consolidation, employees have been able to keep Direct Inward Dial (DID) lines.  This provides improved call handling flexibility and efficiency. We have also seen better call quality of voice-based IP communications because each SIP Trunk is a dedicated “channel”.

As you can see, SIP Trunking and OCS are already providing Aspect with some pretty impressive benefits.  But, I am convinced that the real value will be in what lies ahead –federated multimedia communications.   What role do you think SIP Trunking will play in getting us there?

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It’s Time to Free IT!

Author: Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy

I was recently at a tradeshow speaking with a number of operations managers who described some of the challenges they are facing in the contact center: slow speed of technology deployments, costly maintenance contracts, difficulty tracking the effectiveness of individual agents, and a lack of metrics, goals and actionable data. In these extremely challenging times, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. Some organizations need to identify immediate cost-savings opportunities, while others are looking more closely at what they can do over the long term.

Plus, another challenge that we hear regularly is that companies have to continually think about the end-of-life of their contact center software, PBXs and teleconferencing solutions. One large financial company told us that 72 percent of all their technology was at or nearing end of life.

The good news is, there is a better way to address these concerns in the contact center – and unified communications is the driver. By combining specific capabilities into a unified communications application that uses software to target operational objectives (such as customer service, collections and sales), organizations can better drive company goals and objectives, start using the solutions quicker and reduce the costs associated with implementation and maintenance.

For example, by uniting capabilities like inbound and voice portal and call centers can coordinate a customer’s experience from self-service through to live agent assisted service and even bring in experts from outside the contact center to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience. Or, by bringing together outbound, voice portal and campaign management capabilities into a unified communications application, organizations can automate early stage collections and provide a more effective past-due account targeting strategy to reduce delinquencies and write-offs.

Not only does combining these capabilities from one vendor into a single unified communications applications allow organizations to target very specific business processes, it also helps them get the technology they need up and running quickly, and leverage the advantages of standards-based IT-ready software solutions. In fact, we’ve seen customers at Aspect reduce maintenance costs by 20 percent and improve productivity by 10 percent by using unified communications applications.

Since so many companies are looking to get the most ROI out of their benefits quickly, it makes sense to deploy an application tailored to specific business goals and requirements. Is your company seeing these challenges that the operations managers mentioned above?

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Aspect and Tellme Join Forces

Author:  Mike Sheridan, SVP of Strategy at Aspect

Aspect is at the Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) Conference in Phoenix this week where I’m pleased to say that we’ve just announced a new agreement with Tellme, a Microsoft subsidiary.

For those of you who are not familiar with Tellme, they are the leader in the hosted speech self-service space.  Their interactive voice response (IVR) technology platform allows users to access interactive VoiceXML (VXML) applications via telephony or other voice-enabled devices, and provides contact centers with a number of benefits; the first is cost.

Tellme provides a good way to implement the speech technology you want and need without incurring significant upfront costs – a valuable option in these unpredictable economic times.  Instead of making large investments in all the ports necessary for the busiest minute you will have in a year, this solution allows you to avoid a big upfront investment and instead choose to pay a monthly fee based on usage.

Tellme’s hosted voice portal solution can also result in significant savings when it comes to ongoing maintenance costs and frustration. This type of solution prevents your staff from having to worry about or deal with regular upgrades to capacity, functionality or features – Tellme automatically handles these.

But what makes this partnership more than just a Barney relationship*, are the interesting integrations that we will deliver between Aspect Unified IP, our all-in-one software-based contact center solution, and Tellme. For example, later this year we will provide the ability for a call to initially terminate on Aspect Unified IP at your site, but take advantage of Tellme voice self service – when needed – while retaining the ability to track the call in real time (and historically) from beginning to end! Essentially you will be able to better understand your customer’s full experience – from self service to live agent assistance – from one display AND use a common tool to easily change the experience for subsequent customers.

The Aspect Professional Services team will extend their experience and expertise around building premise-based VXML applications to include the Tellme platform.  They will also expand their skills around implementing Aspect Unified IP in conjunction with the Tellme platform, so they can quickly deliver a complete solution.

Essentially the Aspect/Tellme partnership provides upfront cost savings, better resiliency and all the reporting and routing advantages of a unified approach brought together in one offering. What do you think? Would you consider a hosted speech solution?

*A Barney relationship is one where the companies declare that “I love you” and “You love me” but nothing post-press release ever happens.

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Winning Over IT With Application Integration

Author:  Roger Sumner

A while ago, I wrote about the importance of synchronizing your contact center infrastructure with the overall enterprise infrastructure. Application integration is a key component in this equation.  But, it’s not reasonable to think that your IT department is going to spend an inordinate amount of time customizing proprietary products with proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to make them work with each other.

Like you, your IT guys have a lot going on and your contact center is just only one of the many critical areas they must support. If you have a poorly integrated contact center system or an extremely siloed set-up, your IT staff is most likely already spending way too much time and money – both of which are generally in short supply these days – on new integrations and maintenance of existing integrations. This is obviously a big challenge right now in a “do more with less” economic environment, but it will become even more of a concern as your company works to implement its unified communications (UC) strategy, which will rely heavily on integration within the contact center and many other areas within the business. 

By making your contact center IT-Ready, you can certainly help simplify life for your IT staff and your enterprise as a whole. You can do this by selecting and deploying contact center solutions that have the right integration points, implement the appropriate business rules and call flows, and work well with the network.

A very important part of this process is choosing software that uses industry standards for integration, such as SOAP, XML and open Web services APIs. Solutions that leverage these standards can be deployed significantly faster as no proprietary skills are required. Plus, if your contact center applications are IT-Ready, you’ll see that your contact center personnel has more control over its applications and performance, and your IT department has more bandwidth to focus on other enterprise-wide initiatives. Certainly, this is a win-win for everyone.

Are your contact center technologies IT Ready? If they do not fit neatly into your physical footprint, network, and reporting and management tools, what are you doing to rectify the problem?

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Using Standards To Reduce The Cost And Complexity Of Your Network Layer

Author:  Gary Barnett

When it comes to reducing IT costs, the network/telephony layer is a good place to start.  But, reducing costs also usually involves eliminating complexity.  And, both objectives are difficult to achieve when you’re using proprietary solutions that are hardware-centric. 

I’m sure your IT department is currently incorporating standards-based solutions into their enterprise architecture.  They are using those solutions to leverage existing investments, eliminate vendor-lock in, save money and time, and reduce risk.  You should be taking the same approach in your contact center – for the exact same benefits – deploying standards-based solutions that will make your center IT-ready.

You see, the network layer, which transports data from here to there and back, has become a commodity – meaning that it all does basically the same thing. The differentiator is the applications sitting on top of the network layer. But your IT staff still wants the flexibility to select their transport of choice and use whatever option best fits the needs and budget of your business – open source Voice over IP (VoIP), such as an Asterisk IP-PBX, closed source VoIP or traditional voice.  Leading IT organizations also want to be able to easily migrate you from traditional switching technologies to SIP-based VoIP, single-site to virtual contact center, centralized to localized management or any combination thereof. 

There may be a major obstacle standing in your way … you may be faced with a hornet’s nest of proprietary solutions that currently comprise your contact center and limit your options.

Incorporating SIP 2.0-compliant solutions into your contact center empowers your IT staff to leverage other investments that have SIP-based capabilities. As a result, you will be able to use a single network layer for all interactions, reduce proprietary hardware dependencies and isolate the impact of change.

In fact, Aspect Software is so serious about the importance of SIP that we recently attended SIPit 22, an event dedicated to refining the SIP protocol and its implementations.  We were one of only 50 companies to attend this year’s SIPit 22, which was coordinated by the SIP Forum.

And, last year, we introduced our SIP Power Through Choice program and challenged all of our contact center peers to guarantee the compliance of their SIP-enabled solutions with SIP 2.0 devices.  We’ve also created an interoperability lab as part of our R&D investment, which pre-certifies “pipes and plumbing” from the leading infrastructure companies to ensure the interoperability of our standards-based solutions.  These are just a few examples of how we are providing you greater choice and control, and you should be looking for this type of commitment from all of your contact center vendors.

Do you feel like your proprietary solutions are holding you back?

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What The Heck Does It Mean To Be IT-Ready? And, Why Should You Care?

Author:  Gary Barnett

During the past few months, we’ve spoken at great length about the business problems that can be solved when the contact center is extended to the enterprise via unified communications (UC). I’m sure that the idea of being able to do this is exciting to you and your contact center colleagues, but when your IT department hears you talking about the possibilities, they’re possibly cringing.  You see, there is a good chance that they’re concerned that you’re planning to take your big black box and mess up their scalable, redundant, and reliable architecture.

The nice thing is you have the ability to calm their fears by letting them know you’re sensitive to their need for IT-ready solutions. You can tell them you want to deploy solutions that are designed and built specifically to meet their challenges – lowering costs, reducing complexity, providing stronger security and greater reliability, and enabling better responsiveness.

So, what the heck does it mean to be IT-ready? At its highest level, IT-ready is a concept.  It represents the notion that “IT-ready” contact center solutions are designed to fold into the enterprise architectures that are being deployed by IT organizations within companies. This in turn gives IT the ability to better address time and budget constraints, and the opportunity to do more with less.

There are five main criteria that must be incorporated into a solution for it to be deemed IT-ready.  The solution must:

1. Utilize services-based software and hosted solutions to more easily employ virtualization tools and techniques to simplify and reduce your physical footprint. An IT-ready unified solution reduces time- and cost-consuming integrations.  And, hosted solutions allow companies to save on network traffic costs and eliminates expensive networking equipment to diminish your cost of ownership. 
2. Provide standards-based capabilities, giving you the power to deploy your contact center applications on top of your transport of choice – Voice over IP or traditional voice (or even a blend of both). IT-ready solutions use session initiation protocol (SIP) to deliver optimal device and service provider choice, support XML-based open Web services and APIs, and integrate to data stores through ODBC, JDBC and XML.
3. Leverage standard system management, security practices and tools such as LDAP, Active Directory and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and SNMP.
4. Offer high availability and reliability and provide a variety of redundancy features – including disaster recovery options – that increase the fault tolerance and efficiency of the system and minimize single points of failure.
5. Support single- or multi-tenant deployments to provide greater choice and control to organizations.

IT-ready solutions are important for a variety of reasons.  Not only can they significantly reduce the burden on your IT staff, they can also give your contact center and your enterprise the tools it needs to reap all of the benefits of UC and, of course, they can help you make your customer happier and improve your bottom line.

Do you think IT-ready solutions will benefit your organization?

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Why Can’t Your Contact Center Infrastructure And The Rest Of Your Enterprise Just Get Along?

Author:  Roger Sumner

For as long as I can remember, most companies have maintained two separate and distinct technology architectures – one for the contact center and the other for the rest of the enterprise.  While that statement is probably somewhat exaggerated, until now, maintaining disparate infrastructures has been an inconvenient truth, but there hasn’t been a compelling reason to bring two diametrically opposed systems together.  Enter unified communications.  In order to extend contact center capabilities out to the enterprise, you really need to start thinking about how you can get your contact center infrastructure to easily interoperate with what’s already serving the rest of your company.
 
Why are we faced with this conundrum?
 
Since the beginning, contact centers have focused on customer-facing business processes – customer service, sales and telemarketing, or collections. One of their primary goals has always been to implement technologies that improve these processes while reducing associated costs and/or increasing revenue.  To achieve these objectives, contact centers have historically been forced to integrate their architectures together using a variety of proprietary solutions from a myriad of vendors. Sometimes these solutions work in harmony and sometimes they don’t.  As a result, it is often difficult for contact centers to pinpoint the place of failure when one occurs and just as challenging to add and integrate new (proprietary) capabilities.
 
Now consider the enterprise architectures – placid by comparison.  This infrastructure, always a work in progress, is being carefully crafted from standard protocols and interfaces.  All the components work together well enough to allow the corporate IT staff to support multiple business units, enable new products, partners and channels, respond to changing competition, manage additional regulation and oversight, support a 7 x 24 x 365 business and protect corporate assets … all while keeping costs to a minimum. IT is building this infrastructure for extreme scalability, flexibility, agility, security, and reliability.
 
Do you think it’s possible for your IT department to synchronize your loosely integrated contact center infrastructure with the enterprise superhighway?  You probably said no (I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture above), but the answer is actually yes.  Regardless of whether your IT group is trying to drive your business through technology or using technology to react to situations, two things can help them align these vastly different architectures – consolidation and standardization.
 
Right now, while you’re reading this blog, your IT staff is probably working on implementing standards across five key elements of your technology architecture – physical footprint, network/telephony, application integration, reporting, and management.   They are doing this so they can increase the re-use of your enterprise’s current technology investments, enhance IT productivity, consolidate redundant platforms and applications, and employ technology innovation as an agent for change. It’s time for you to help your IT staff fit your contact center applications neatly into the above-mentioned stack of elements so that the contact center and the rest of the enterprise can learn to talk to one another.
 
Is your contact center technology playing nicely with the rest of the enterprise? If not, keep an eye out for Gary’s upcoming blog about how you can make your contact center IT-ready.

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Making Strides in SIP Interoperability

Author: Tim Sipsey

I’ve been working with standards-based technologies and session initiation protocol (SIP) platforms for years, and I’m grateful to the luminaries for letting me share my experience at the SIPit conference for my first blog post!

Aspect Software was one of about 50 companies that attended SIPit 22 on 14-18 April 2008. The event was held at the New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. The purpose of the SIPit event is to allow organizations to test product or device interoperability for SIP implementations, determine the source of incompatibilities, and if the SIP specification is at fault, prepare a “fix” for the draft revision. Overall, it was a great success. And when I say success, I don’t just mean we made successful SIP calls, but we were able to verify interoperability of newly added features such as transmission control protocol (TCP) capability and other SIP-related Request for Comments (RFCs) that will provide better support for SIP enterprise environments. While the SIPit event is sometimes perceived as being an ad-hoc type of event, in fact it’s very well organized. Basically, a week before the event, participants begin making contacts with other participants to propose scheduling hour time slots to perform testing.

Aspect arrived with our schedule completely booked. Our testing varied depending on the type of SIP implementation, such as a SIP endpoint or another SIP Proxy or B2BUA. This was a great opportunity to have an environment to perform real-world testing on implementations, get a gauge of how well our products are meeting standards, and pinpoint what areas need improvement. The show helps enhance the SIP standard because it uncovers any ambiguities in the standard as written and helps SIP to become a more globally interoperable protocol. Attending the SIPit event is one of the many steps Aspect Software has taken to demonstrate SIP interoperability and educate the industry on the benefits of SIP in the contact center, such as lowered costs, improved flexibility, and increased interoperability. In addition, this participation at SIPit helps validate our commitment to the SIP Power Through Choice program , which issued a challenge to the contact center industry to adopt SIP interoperability policies.

Aspect Software has attended previous SIPit events, but it is very important to see how well the products are interoperating with our peers based on the current SIP Standard RFC 3261, and to demonstrate to our customers and prospects that we are continuing to enhance the SIP capabilities of our solutions.

One of the perks of attending the SIPit event is the social portion, where we can get to know some of our peers in the telephony industry. This year it was at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium where we were treated to a buffet and a show that took us on a journey through space 100,000 light years from planet Earth. The next SIPit 23 won’t be so quite far away. It is scheduled for 13-17 Oct 2008 in Lannion, France.

More companies are seeing the value of standards and SIP telephony in general. I’d like to hear about the steps your company is taking to ensure your products are SIP compliant and services-based.

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