It’s quickly becoming apparent that Conversational Commerce and Recombinant Communications are inextricably intertwine. (Try saying that five times fast). We’re in month 2 of Siri’s beta release on Apple’s iPhone 4S and we’re already witnessing how the service will improve as a product of natural selection, gradual upgrades, augmentation and evolution. As a case in point, spoken queries to Siri regarding electronic gadgets, appliances, games and computers will result in a display of responses that include the the SKUs (stock keeping units) in Best Buy’s catalog.

You can find coverage of the phenomenon in dozens of tech publications today, but they seem to trace back to this post on the Apple-centric tech blog called RazorianFly.com. According to the post, the enhancement is very much the result of Wolfram Alpha (an answer-oriented search engine that is integrated into Siri’s search results) integrating with Best Buy’s product database through BestBuy.com’s API. Or, as more than one tech blog put it, Siri now returns the same errors as a search on Wolfram Alpha.

As Shaylin Clark at WebProNews explains in the post above, as a “computational engine” oriented toward asking questions, Wolfram Alpha can be quirky (he calls it “finicky”). But putting speech-based access to comparison shopping that includes Best Buy’s inventory marks progress, even if the results are not always optimal. The point is that end-users are gaining experience with the service. They are learning what it is good at and where it fails.

My empirical observation is that people are being much more patient with Siri than they had been with prior renditions of voice-based “assistants” (like Wildfire, HeyAnita or Webley). One reason is that the service is faster, better, more robust and capable of doing more things than its predecessors. There’s more knowledge in the databases that comprise its available knowledge (heck, it defaults to a search on Google, but it has maps, online music and Wolfram Alpha to bring to bear). It’s very early days and Siri is bound to get better. And it will inspire competing services from Google, Microsoft/Tellme, Amazon, Nuance, Vlingo and a handful of others. Each will add new features, functions, information and APIs to differentiate their services and deliver a better customer experience.

At this point Apple has taken a leadership position by coming to market with a service that’s instantiated as an embedded application that recognizes utterances accurately; determines context and meaning; and then has meaningful integrations with a broad range of knowledge bases so that it starts by recognizing intent and finishes by delivering relevant results. The truly exciting aspect to this is that the the services from Apple and its competitors will continue to evolve and get better.

In 2011, the idea of “self-service” is morphing from a derogatory term about automated handling of calls into an IVR or contact center and has transformed into the preferred point of arrival for users of the mobile, multimodal Internet. In 2015 we will look back to this year as one in which several emerging technologies formed the basis of products and services that define how individuals carry out everyday commerce. These are:

Accurate speech recognition combined with natural language processing: This gets to the heart of Conversational Commerce. Credit Apple’s Siri with bringing the speech enabled mobile assistant into prime time, but expect category leaders Google (just Google the word “Majel”) and Microsoft/Tellme to use their investment in speech processing technologies to leverage themselves into the mobile assistant realm. Collectively, they are making it more comfortable for people to carry out conversations with their smartphones (or tablets or TVs or cars).

Nuance will be a formidable competitor in this realm, working closely with IP and researchers from IBM. Nuance’s speech processing technology is deeply embedded in iOS-based devices (though the licensing terms and details on the integration are closely guarded). Therefore, Nuance is a direct beneficiary of Siri’s success. In the mean time, the company has effectively marketed its own platform for mobile dictation and speech input under the Dragon brand and has launched Dragon Go!, which demonstrates the value of deep integration with popular mobile destinations, including Yelp, OpenTable, Google, Bing, YouTube and a couple hundred others, based on context.

Vlingo is also formidable in this category. Aside from launching an all-out patent war in the U.S. courts, it has effectively differentiated itself as offering capabilities that neither Siri nor Nuance presently have. One of the most important is “hands-free” operation. Using the wake up words “Hey Vlingo” mobile subscribers can then enter commands and content to hear or originate text messages, conduct searches or get driving directions. These are compelling use cases and provide the mechanism for users to put their devices (running all their personal apps) under the control of their voice. Given its size, relative to the cohort of Google, Microsoft, Apple and even IBM (which is working directly with Nuance), it is unlikely that Vlingo will be acting alone. Regardless of who emerges as its benefactor or owner (device maker, mobile carrier, cloud computing provide…), Vlingo’s presence will be felt in the 2015 timeframe.

The Smartphone+Cloud paradigm: This is closely related to Apple and Siri because Siri is an app running “natively” on the iPhone 4S, but relying heavily on speech processing and computing resources in Apple’s cloud. As the retail price of smartphones continues to decline – especially with subsidies from wireless carriers – the adoption curve continues to get steeper and the population of wireless smartphone users gets more attractive. That’s why so many service providers and content providers are comfortable targeting smartphone users as a key customer base.

Common wisdom has it that, by 2015, platform fragmentation issues vis-a-vis smartphones will be largely behind us. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android will share leadership. Android will have the edge in terms of devices in service and Apple will have the more coherent strategy for monetization of content and service delivery. They will be joined by one or more companies that, today, are considered also-rans, most likely Microsoft’s Windows Phone (with a big assist from Nokia) and perhaps RIM Blackberry. In a perfect world, the “open source” version of HP’s WebOS will become the basis for innovative application development and delivery, but that is unlikely unless there’s a cloud-based entity with its eyes on the smartphone prize.

Incidentally, Amazon.com’s acquisition of Yap shows that it has its eye on speech enabling the mobile phone (not just the smartphone) crowd. This means that Salesforce.com, which watches the operations of Amazon Web Services (AWS) quite closely will emerge as an important player in the smartphone+cloud domain by 2015.

Spoken words recognized as information assets: Once you have people comfortable talking to their smartphones, you have a rich new set of utterances to go into a corpus of data to support better understanding. In the U.S., compliance with federal laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requires companies to capture and store the content of phone conversations between and among employees, customers and prospects. To make the best of the situation, companies have been able to analyze, index and tag the content of these conversations to support business goals, often as part of WFO (work force optimization) programs in contact centers or to facilitate collaboration among geographically dispersed workgroups on a collaboration platform.

Customer care analytics specialists, like Nexidia, CallMiner, Verint and others have developed proprietary approaches to detect patterns, tag and analyze conversations. More recently a firm called HarQen was chartered specifically to treat spoken words as information assets. Its core product line, Symposia, captures and stores the audio from telephone calls and conference calls and allows participants or other listeners to tag or annotate conversations and share them with others. They have developed use cases for human resources to support interviews, performance reviews and the like. But the broader applications for company-wide and global deployments span a wide variety of collaboration efforts in sales, marketing, customer support or product development.

Today, speech analytics can be a complex and expensive proposition. In some cases it involves capture, transcription, tagging, analytics and reporting. In others it is pure pattern recognition, where the core technologies detect recurring utterances or find a set of predefined phrases (like detecting the hashtag “#FAIL” in a Tweet). By 2015, it will be routine to treat spoken words as just another set of unstructured data which can be put under an analytic lens in order to support specified objectives.

Advent of true “self” service: When you put these the above-mentioned technologies together, you have the foundation for smartphone-based services that are highly responsive to individual end-users. Ideally they can distinguish between background noise and spoken words, they can detect activate programs when a “wake-up word” is uttered, they can also distinguish between the voice of their owner and others and then bring pre-loaded preferences, account numbers, historical activities, loyalty programs and other personal data or PII (personally identifiable information) to bear on the task at hand.

Modern CRM and “social CRM” systems give the appearance of understanding intent, but it is largely the product of well-informed guess work, relying on data and metadata provided by customers or third-parties. By contrast, services that adhere to the “Smartphone+cloud paradigm can offer true “self-service.” For example, a smartphone app from French auto insurer Groupama (called “Groupama toujour la” or Groupama Always There) uses the iPhone’s screen as a visual display of agent queues and enables policyholders to indicate the purpose of the call and elect to stay on hold or schedule a call-back.

During the past few years, individual customers have been provided with tools to shorten the time it takes to get to a human when calling the companies with which they want to carry out business. Fonolo, Lucyphone and, more recently Hold Free are each taking different approaches to empowering phone-based customers. By 2015, we can foresee self-service more use cases and deployments that enable mobile subscribers to use their smartphones to take greater control of what personal data they would like to share, with whom they want to share it and their terms and conditions for how friends or the companies they are doing business with can make their info available to others.

Add a speech recognition and natural language understanding and you can see how an individual might say “I’m hungry” and have that two word utterance interpreted properly, and Siri-like results returned. Something like “The next available reservation at your favorite restaurant is at 6:30 PM. Should I make a reservation for you? Or would you like to invite someone else to join you?”

The technologies that are destined to survive and thrive are those that support highly personalized, conversational interactions that culminate in a transaction or other tangible result. This should be the prevailing definition of “self service.” In the near term, enterprises are spending billions of dollars on “Big Data,” business intelligence and analytics resources. Ironically, “Enterprise Mobility” is a close second based on research conducted by the likes of IBM. Our own research, to be published in January, shows that a majority of executives in large enterprises don’t have a defined strategy for managing all the data and metadata generated by mobile customers. When they do, they will also do a much better job of hearing and responding to their true wants, needs and preferences, as well as intent.

The customer care pendulum will swing away from the enterprise’s CRM system as a “customer interaction hub” to a more distributed system where individuals are at the center of their own self-service system.

In a move that gets to the heart of Opus Research’s original concept of “Recombinant Communications” (RC), business process outsourcing (BPO) specialist Teletech has reached an agreement whereby it will resell features, capabilities and components hosted in Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud. Peaking inside the cloud (and under the hood) of Service Cloud, one finds the resources to support a multi-modal, multichannel contact center. Agents can engage in presence-based chat, via Salesforce Chatter and will also find hooks into ways to monitor and communicate over Twitter and Facebook.

As illustrated in the thumbnail sketch that leads into this post, Service Force is a cloud-base instantiation of all of Salesforce.com’s resources optimized to support a company’s customer service reps. Chatter acts as one of the points of ingress, but there are others that can be custom built as a customer portal, a vehicle for displaying dynamic customer profiles, a resource for carrying out business intelligence and analytic functions as the foundation of customer care activities. In the spirit of RC, Teletech clients will be able to retain and leverage elements of their existing customer care infrastructure while contracting with Teletech to make sure that they can integrate activity from mobile devices or via social networks.

Working with Salesforce.com is not unexplored territory for Teletech. In August 2010 the company hosted software that comprised the infrastructure for a service called the Customer Interaction Cloud, which was jointly offered by Cisco and Salesforce.com. The BPO specialist has experience with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Jigsaw, Force.com and Database.com and is prepared to integrate these capabilities into its clients customer care fabric.

As we enter the season of giving, Voxeo has formally launched the Voxeo Connect program offering go-to-market partners, including solution providers, resellers and systems integrators. In a related story, the company also announced that contact center solutions specialist Digital DataVoice has completed the certification process for the invitation-only Voxeo Connect Certified Partner Program. Both developments mark the continued progress by Voxeo in bringing tangible tools and support programs to its community of over 200,000 developers and customers, including 45,000 “companies” and “half the Fortune 100.”

Acknowledging that the vast majority of its business comes through indirect channel, Voxeo has beefed up its partner support resources in significant ways. It has committed real dollars to market development and joint marketing programs culminating in distributing sales leads, investing in training, and maintaining a pool of “Marketing Development Funds” (MDF) to underwrite co-marketing and demand generation efforts.

Likewise, its Developer Portal has been retooled to include marketing and sales support resources – collateral, case studies, sample proposals, demos, Webcasts and the like – to help shorten the sales cycle associated with increasingly complex multi-channel platform implementations. Just as important, its “Obsession Teams” of support technicians guarantee 20 minute response time to issues emanating from Certified and Global partners.

Voxeo is making a successful transition from a “geeky” techno-focussed company whose strict adherence to standards like VoiceXML and ccXML, as well as the layering on of development tools and multi-channel resources appealed to the adventurous appDev Nation. Now it has developed a compelling story around “The Triple Cloud” – a concept that leverages its long tenure cloud-based self-service resources, while amplifying the message that deployments can be on-premises, in-the-cloud or both.

Voxeo has confidence in its technology and recognizes that competing for enterprise dollars at this point is a marketing challenge. The competition includes old guard hosted service providers like West Interactive, Convergys and Microsoft/Tellme. But all contact infrastructure providers are adding cloud-based options. For example, Cisco today formally launched its Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center. It has hooks into the Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP), as well as social network monitoring and a modicum of multi-channel support. Genesys and Avaya have similar product lines and cloud-based roadmaps.

Cloud-based e-commerce and CRM specialists, an inchoate group that pits Salesforce.com and its partners against Amazon Web Services and its partners, as well every CRM platform provider that has a hosted flavor (think Pegasystems, Oracle/RightNow, Microsoft/Aspect, SAP….). To compete effectively in this environment, Voxeo is correct to put extra umph behind its partner support strategy. That makes Voxeo Connect the right initiative at the right time.

Siri is being covered in most of the business and popular press as a “mobile assistant.” But its long-term impact is tightly bound to how end-users discover, define, and get comfortable of new ways to control devices, navigate content and carry out daily activities through mobile devices.

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Two of its three Series B investors our upping their ante in Twilio, providing cash to fuel the three-year-old company’s international expansion and growth in support of a community of telco application developers and customer that has already exceeded 75,000. In a way, it is a form of “doubling down,” in that the $17 million in Series C, brings the grand total of investment in Twilio (including “seed” money) to $34 million. The grand prize, as we discussed in this post regarding the recent Twilio Developers Conference are the proceeds of the $250 billion in global spending on telephone services around the world.

As a private company, Twilio does not report its bottom line results, but it reports growth in many variables that drive top line growth, including a 400% growth in its customer base and demonstration of a number of applications and use cases that will drive increased traffic in both SMS-based messaging and minutes of use on its telephony cloud. Today, its employee count is approaching 100. They are primarily located in San Francisco. It opened its UK office in October to support European expansion. Some of the cash infusion is earmarked to support presence in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Romania, Greece, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Finland.

Putting the lie to the general critique that many of the Web 2.0 companies – Twitter and Facebook had been cited – generate profits without creating jobs, Twilio has new posts for The company is hiring positions in sales, marketing, and engineering and encourages interested candidates should visit http://twilio.com/jobs.

From a strategic point of view, Twilio’s ability to attract investment signals continued interest in the ever-changing concept of a “The Transformational Telephone Company” – which I think of as a set of resources that comprise “Conversations as a Platform.” Jeff Lawson, one of Twilio’s co-founders, says the company’s sights set on Microsoft’s Skype, which was one of the first IP-based telephony platform providers and, along with Google (whose GoogleVoice rose out of the combination of GrandCentral and Gizmo5), started to simplify the ways that individuals could receive or originate conversations across multiple locations, devices, modalities (text, voice, video) and even time.

These telephony stalwarts demonstrated what was possible on “closed,” proprietary systems. It sparked the imagination of a new generation of telco application developers. Then companies like Voxeo Labs (then called Adhearsion), which now offers a wide range of capabilities to developers through its PRISM platform; the late, lamented Ribbit; and another set of developers around “open PBXs” thrived while building applications on top of Asterisk, VXI, FreeSwitch and others.

With investment, interest and imagination comes action and innovation. 2012 is shaping up to be a year in which the time it takes to conceive of a new service that support better conversations and when it is formally delivered to a mainstream subscribers shrinks from months to weeks (and even days). We’ve already documented how the GroupMe texting service was originated using the Twilio platform in a one-day “hackathon.” After a successful year of service delivery, the company was purchased by Microsoft/Skype for something in excess of $65 million.

In 2012, I expect accelerated activity among the giant companies across telephony, IT and search to continue. Twilio and its community of developers may have its sights set on Skype/Microsoft. The aforementioned Google will continue to grow its presence with a set of offerings that span devices (they own Motorola Mobility), speech processing, call processing, “identity” (with directories embedded in Gmail, G+…) and ultimately eCommerce. That’s where other “giants” in the cloud have come to play: including Amazon Web Services, Saleforce.com and (yes) Oracle. The most interesting “interested parties” in the new ecosystem are the diversified, incumbent telcos: AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, Deutsche Telecom and others. Which brings us back to the service delivery platform providers, especially Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and others.

2012 will be a great year for developers around the world!

Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie has been ridiculed elsewhere for suggesting that Tellme is his company’s answer to Apple’s Siri. Nonetheless, there is more than a little bit of truth to his assertion. As illustrated in this “concept video” which Microsoft issued in August 2011, researchers at Tellme and the Speech at Microsoft Group were vectoring toward a voice interface that understood a mobile subscribers intent and vectored her toward transactions (warning: Silverlight required). Alas, the vision is not quite reality, as shown in this “side-by-side” comparison.

As speech geeks (like me) know, such an uncontrolled experiment is basically unfair. In these cases, the noise created as one phone presents an audio response to a spoken question is destined to confound the other device’s ability to carry out its task. But even if the Windows Phone 7 running Tellme failed to perform tasks with the same proficiency as Siri, just sharing the screen with the iPhone 4S was a marketing coup. It also set the stage for a set of product announcements that are destined to make Tellme and Speech at Microsoft top of mind during the holiday buying season.

This graphic from Microsoft’s Image Gallery illustrates how people can use their voices, in conjunction with an xBox 360, Kinect motion detection and Bing Search, to take command and navigate the growing variety of content offered through TV screens. The library or database of streamed content includes xBox 360 games as well as an online catalog of movies, sports events, television shows and music. Its current roster of contet providers/distributors include Hulu Plus, Last.fm, Netflix, Zune music and video and ESPN®. This content is offered through the broadband transport resources of AT&T U-verse® TV in the U.S., TELUS in Canada, BSkyB in the U.K., CANAL+ in France, Vodafone Portugal, VimpelCom in Russia and FOXTEL in Australia.

The full roster of TV and streamed fare is included in this press release, along with a timetable for roll-out of additional content and distributors in 2012, including Comcast’s Xfinity On Demand channels. All told, “nearly 40″ TV and entertainment providers joined in the October launch announcement and will now be part of “customized, voice-controlled experiences to Xbox 360 systems.”

Microsoft is promoting voice command of the xBox in TV commercials and multiple advertising campaigns. It already claims 35 million members of xBox Live and has found that a significant percentage of them are already comfortable carrying out conversational interactions with other xBox Live members (as part of multiplayer games). Commanding to the console to find specific songs, programs, sports events or other entertainment is starting to feel more and more natural. Voice command for remote control TV has lured the likes of Promptu and Google into ill-fated initiatives, but Microsoft Kinect users have already had positive experience using both voice and gestures to command xBox games. Navigating and interacting with a broader set of content types and sources should be a natural. It should be much easier than scrolling through a video guide with hundreds of channels and a near infinite number of time slots.

For iPhone 4S users, Siri defines the new mobile user interface. It integrates automated speech recognition with resources for natural language understanding and supports a “short list” of common, mobile use cases. Its most prominent competitors for this role are Vlingo, Google Voice Action and more than a dozen mobile voice interface providers.

xBox Kinect will find that the mix of utility and entertainment ingrained in Tellme (along with Bing Search) has a chance to define the set of voice-enabled living room applications. Google will be there as well along with Apple, Logitech and a handful of others. Collectively, their efforts are making 2011-2012 to be the year that the voice user interface becomes acceptable for a multiplicity of “mainstream” activities.

West Corporation’s pending acquisition of HyperCube brings to light a very important “ground truth” in the world of Conversational Commerce. Just as “accuracy” is crucial to speech recognition and natural language understanding, “reliability” is the foundation of network performance and, therefore, low-latency cloud-based or hybrid applications. HyperCube, whose specialty is variously described as “tandem switching,” “toll-free origination services”, and “neutral interconnection services” fills an important gap in the multichannel service delivery fabric. It is so important that West has determined that now is the time to take ownership of its facilities, functions and hire its personnel in the interest of staying ahead of its competition in providing hosted communications and network infrastructure solutions to manage or support critical communications functions.

Not too long ago, the problems associated with supporting mission critical communications functions could be knocked with an NOC (Networks Operations Center). That’s the futuristic control room that carriers like AT&T or Verizon or hosted services providers like West, Voxeo, Tellme, FirstData Voice and others would showcase to customers, clients, prospects or analysts on tours. On the front wall would be a map of the U.S. or World, usually with a multiplicity of status indicators. A spider’s web of green lines showed communications paths. Green, yellow or red dots showing network endpoints. Scrolling text would provide details on network status.

But these NOCs were customarily one dimensional. They showed “voice” traffic over fixed lines or “trunked up” traffic over fiber networks. That’s because service levels could be largely met by monitoring the performance of a limited number of network providers, primarily long-distance carriers. This is no longer so when communications between enterprises and individuals can originate from any number of devices and cross so many network boundaries. All an individual wants when communicating with a business is a reliable connection. There is little concern about or visibility into whether a link is analog, digital, switched, VoIP or a combination of all of the above. Nor can one predict whether the underlying medium is optical fiber or the airwaves, over-the-top or through the switches.

Almost two years ago, I penned an opinion piece called “Five 9’s Fuggedaboutit!” In it I suggested that the service provider world should get off its high-horse regarding reliability in order to let end-users define the level of performance that they find acceptable. I pointed out that Twitter users tolerate the “Fail Whale” and those folks who use voicemail-to-text transcription have grown accustomed to strange renderings of spoken words (they’ve even made it into a game).

In spite of my glib treatment of performance issues, “network assurance” is a discipline and business opportunity that Opus Research has tagged as “vital” in the IP-driven, multi-channel and multimodal world of self-service and customer care. West is dealing with it by acquiring a firm that has demonstrated high-reliability across multiple B2C (business to customer, like outbound alerts) and C2B (customer-to-Business, like inbound, toll-free) channels. We’ll be covering many more initiatives that address “service levels” in the era of Conversational Commerce in the coming year.

In a pre-holiday-rock-your-world moment, Avaya and Salmat jointly announced a multi-million dollar (meaning between $10 and $20 million) deal whereby the Australian contact center outsourcer would replace its Genesys-based platform with “a broad suite of Avaya technology and expertise.” According to this media release, “Salmat will commence the rollout of the Avaya technology across all of its contact centre operations in February 2012.” It is expected to take 12 months to implement, at which time 7,500 contact center agents will be using Avaya’s technology.

According to coverage in the Australian press Salmat, which handles over 100 million inbound and outbound calls each year on behalf of its clients, had “scoured the world” for a new solution provider. Its vendor selection started with 10 prospective winners but, in the end, was winnowed down to Avaya and one other (unnamed) candidate.

We’ll presume that Genesys, as incumbent platform provider, was considered as a candidate from the start. Indeed, it had shown an impressive array of enhancements to its core Customer Interaction Manager (CIM), including the introduction of a Conversation Manager to support “intelligent” handling of multi-channel and multi-modal interactions. Genesys also has a longer history of hosted implementations of CIM as well as the use of the Genesys Voice Portal (and its precursor VoiceGenie platform) for applications involving voice-based authentication.

The transition to a totally new platform is, to the best of our understanding, something of a rip-and-replace operation during which business continuity could be something of a challenge. This is especially true because Avaya, has had a love/hate relationship with “hosted” or “cloud-based” implementations. The move to IP-based implementations provided some initiatives toward hosted renditions of IP-based ACD and Contact Center resources. According to literature, both Telecom Italia and Sprint have offered hosted renditions of Avaya’s IP-based call processing resources.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Avaya has yet to bless or integrate voice biometric authentication into its IP-based Contact Center or its Experience Portal. By contrast, Salmat has made a point of differentiating itself by offering caller authentication as a service to financial institutions, healthcare providers, telecom service providers and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. We’re anxious to see how smoothly the re-hosting takes place in the coming year. And we want to welcome Avaya into the community of voice biometrics-based solution providers.

Cloud-based contact center specialist LiveOps is buying New Zealand-based DataSquirt for $12.5 million. As a result, LiveOps will take ownership of the firm that provides CONTACT(TM), a suite of services that augment the core, live agent/voice services with an array of delivery options that include text messages, email and Twitter. The new services, packaged as LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Mobile are “available for purchase” as of now, with general availability scheduled for the first week in December.

LiveOps has offered “white label versions of DataSquirt services to its clients for some time and held exclusive North American distribution rights since May of this year. The acquisition marks another step toward making CONTACT to market and integrate DataSquirt’s code and personnel into the LiveOps fold. This is consistent with the company’s policy of making sure all elements are both field-tested and “hardened” to operate well on the LiveOps platform.

Through acquisition, LiveOps is also adding over 60 mobile and multichannel clients. This, in turn, brings new use cases that make the “social/mobile/cloud” mantra more than just a series of buzz words, as well as case studies that show how well-recognized (and often conservative) outfits like ADT which made text messaging the preferred means to conduct “safety checks” with its guards; Amway, using the cloud to manage text and email messaging with its network of salespeople; and the Royal Mail Group (which operates the British Post Office) which added Twitter as a channel in and out of its contact centers.

But the acquisition is not primarily about adding new customers. LiveOps has already demonstrated the power of cloud-based resources to support a community of remote agents. They, in turn, have gained experience using social networks to maintain a sense of community and bolster morale among geographically-dispersed employees. These agents are likely to be more comfortable than their brick-and-mortar counterparts when communicating with customers and prospects – in addition to each other – using text, Tweets or email.

The growth of remote agents and the “fractional workforce” is a sign of the times. Our informal survey of contact center oursourcers shows that virtually every one of them is building more infrastructure to support growing communities of at home agents. With a history that dates back to 2000 (or 2002 when you consider the combination of LiveOps with CallCast’s platform) LiveOps was the first company to start tackling technological and social issues associated with building a business based on fostering the growth of work-at-home agent activities.

The acquisition of DataSquirt acknowledges that the integration of text messaging, social networks and email is a must to keep conversations growing on the platform.