Back in March, Orange Business marked the eighteenth month of its “Business Together with Microsoft” marketing program by offering a new instance of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that integrates OCS into a managed offering built on Cisco IP-Telephony infrastructure. At the time, through the Business Together program, 450,000 enterprise end-users were already using Microsoft Communicator supplied by Orange.
The Business Together program brought Cisco more tightly into the mix of products and services positioning Communicator as a single point of entry for real-time, multi-modal communications including IM, email, and mobile telephony. The Cisco connection starts with Cisco branded IP-phones that facilitate both presence indicators and “click-to-call” call initiation among other employees or business partners with contact lists associated with Microsoft’s OCS, Outlook, Office suite or SharePoint software. I believe Microsoft’s Active Directory server must be involved as well.
Meanwhile, Aspect Software continues to chronicle advancements in OCS deployment both internally and externally. As part of the inside game Aspect continues to illustrate the adoption and use of OCS throughout its company on this site. [As a brief aside, it looks like "federated" IMing has a long way to go.] For outside consumption, Aspect announced general availability of a suite of software called UC for the Contact Center. This instance extends OCS-based IM into the contact center to facilitate functions like “Ask and Expert”. It also marks the marketing debut of Tellme (Microsoft’s IVR subsidiary) as the integrated speech application service provider (ASP) for “hybrid” voice self-service deployments.
Both approaches are designed to accelerate deployment of applications built on a decidedly Microsoft-flavored approach to Unified Communications. For Aspect, UC is a Microsoft-only proposition, with tight integration to Aspect’s suite of inbound and outbound customer care software suites and workforce management software. Orange Business has a number of other approaches, including an instance of Genesys Customer Interaction Management to support multivendor environments.


One of the early fruits of the partnership is an application for the Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry that performs real time translation between spoken English and Arabic.
I’ve written a lot about Google Voice on this site. Today Greg Sterling took his turn on the Local Mobile Search site,
Verizon Business recently issued this
“On-demand” services are a sign of the times as financial pressures lead companies to avoid capital expenses without compromising the quality of services offered customers or the quality of life for employees. Risk reduction is a big part of the decision process as well. Customer care support infrastructure has become fragile (some would say “brittle”) when trying to accommodate changes in delivery channels (from phone to Web to social media to mobile devices and any mixture that customers can conceive). That’s why it is a relief to migrate all or part of the operations to third-party service providers with pay-as-you-go or on-demand options for customer self-service elements like interactive voice response (IVR), e-commerce Web sites, outbound notifications, live agent call-handling and “all-of-the-above.”
Whether you love it, hate it or just don’t get it, micro-blogging platform Twitter is a social media force to be reckoned with. Voxeo has an answer for it in its newly IMified-enabled platform that includes automated handling of both inbound and outbound Twitter traffic as part of Unified Self-Service. As we discussed in
The adoption of voiceprints to authenticate wireless subscribers is accelerating, thanks to a new installation of PerSay’s VocalPassword(TM) developed and installed by Turkish speech application specialist SPEECHOUSE at Vodafone Turkey. With roughly 16 million subscribers, Vodafone Turkey is the second largest mobile carrier in the country. Yet, if past is prologue, the incorporation of voice authentication into the customer care fabric of any Vodafone subsidiary is bound to have implications across all of its properties – an empire of over 300 million customers.
The deployment as a milestone in a couple of respects. The mobile market holds huge potential for speaker authentication for customer care and electronic payments. In addition, Vodafone Turkey clearly sees subscriber authentication as a source of differentiation in a long-standing battle for share versus Turkcell. In that pursuit, SPEECHOUSE has successfully integrated speaker authentication into the IVR-based Vodafone Voice Portal Platform. The immediate result is the use of a spoken password for secure self service applications the mobile equivalent of password reset, GSM PUK (Personal Unlocking Key) reset.
It’s time to fuel more speculation surrounding the launch of a more broadly accessible Google Voice. The buzz started last week when John Fontana at Network World (among others) reported that Google had reserved 1 million telephone numbers from its IP-telephony carrier, Level 3. In many ways, claiming such a large block of numbers is the antithesis of the “bring your own phone number” strategy we discussed in 


