Author: Andy Bezaitis

During my first few weeks at Aspect, I’ve had a chance to meet some great people and gain more insight into the company’s opportunities in the unified communications (UC) market, as the new senior vice president of corporate development.

The UC space has been gaining a lot more attention from analysts and the media during the last 12 months, even though CIOs have been talking about UC (without calling it “UC”) for the past 10 years. All the pieces— conferencing, IM, presence, collaboration tools— have been in place for years, but I do see a change happening - in fact, I would call it a major business shift.

In much the same way that virtualization and the remote worker has changed the way companies do business, organizations are starting to realize how UC can change business models. For the first time, organizations are pulling best practices and applications from a part of the business that, until now, has essentially been operating in a business silo—the contact center. But what is driving this change? I’m seeing enterprises that are delving into UC that clearly need capabilities that have been honed in the contact center, such as routing, monitoring, and scheduling, but the contact center requires the capabilities that are embedded in the enterprise, such as instant messaging and presence. So what exactly is driving the need for UC interoperability—the contact center, or the enterprise?

The truth is, both parts of the organization mutually need capabilities from each other to implement a successful UC strategy that creates an optimal customer experience and provides an organization with radical business process improvements. There really aren’t any vendors that are offering the total portfolio of enterprise and contact center solutions. The fact is, there are three major players in the UC space: Microsoft, Cisco and IBM —and any vendor that doesn’t align themselves with one of these “UC Big Three” will not have much of a leg to stand on. With our Microsoft alliance, Aspect is certainly in a position to cater to both the enterprise and the contact center with key applications. But, we’re going to take that a step further.

We are building out a services organization that is going to be a clear differentiator in the UC market. At this point in the adoption curve, companies need services and support to provide business solutions, rather than point products and ensure that the enterprise and contact center technologies seamlessly interoperate and are fully utilized for greater choice, control, and maximum business impact. The vendor that offers these standards-based, interoperable solutions coupled with high-touch, high-level services will be the one-stop UC shop. And that is where Aspect is headed.

I’m excited to be a part of a team that understands this business-model shift and I’d like to thank Gary, Jim and Roger for allowing me to share my thoughts on this blog. Feel free to drop me a line—I’m definitely interested in hearing about the different enterprise and contact center technologies your company is implementing, and about your experience with services.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Unified Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.