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.

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.

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West’s approach captures the spirit of Recombinant Communications (RC) by making it simpler for companies to preserve and extend the service lives of the resources that work well for them, meaning premises-based servers that perform speech-processing, call-processing and self-service applications. At the same time, it lays the foundation for them to incorporate or “splice in” the latest technologies, tools, data and meta-data that make Conversational Commerce within reach. That’s how West’s managed, on-premises model a transformational product (or service) fits the need for companies to lean on 3rd parties take the risk out plans to take advantage of what is now called “The Cloud,” but could, just as accurately be thought of as hosted services. Thus it will accelerate the transformation to cloud-based instantiation of self-service while maintaining flexibility in their deployment strategy and maintaining the resilience of their time-tested on-premises solutions.

With its new, managed services approach, West supports the “hybrid” deployment strategies that are becoming commonplace in these very dynamic times.

Today, Cisco announced formal arrangements with a number service providers to offer Quad on a hosted or managed services basis. The chosen service providers include ACS (a Xerox company) in North America, Logicalis UK in Western Europe, and Alphawest (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) in Australia.

Its objective is to give companies of all sizes, around the globe, the opportunity to experience Quad for themselves. Unlike a lot of social media, Cisco employees see Quad as a real boon to productivity. If integrated with Cisco Pulse (which I wrote about in this post in November 2009), it can be used to “tag” elements (like audio tracks from teleconferences or the contents of messages) to make them more suitable for sharing.

Based on its own experience, Cisco realizes that the value Quad will differ on a company-by-company basis. It is a service that each company will have to experience in order to recognize its tangible value. That’s why Cisco has engaged CapGemini to act in both a consulting and system integration capacity as part of the roll-out. CG’s roles will span from “defining use cases and business goals for social collaboration to implementing and integrating Quad within the customer’s existing processes and environments, as well as driving governance and adoption to ensure the effective use of the platform.”

This move to cloud-based instantiation of Quad will make it more competitive with Microsoft Lync (which is offered on a hosted basis through Microsoft Office 365 and the Azure cloud) as well as IBM’s collaboration suite offered on a hosted basis as LotusLive. That said, Cisco Pulse stands to be a real differentiator.

After Thomas H. Lee and Quandrangle Partners took “recapitalized” West in 2006 (for $3.34 billion), they initially planned a $500 million stock offer in October 2009. The filing was amended in April of this year, but no date has been established for its formal introduction. As outlined in this S-1 Filing, with the Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Barclay’s and Wells Fargo, as lead underwriters, it looks like the leveraged buy-out specialists Thomas H. Lee and Quadrangle are ready for a liquidity event. The timing is very good, the company is profitable and positioned to provide core technologies that can help the telephone, voice processing and contact center agents assume their rightful positions along the critical paths of conversational commerce.

Their recent alliance with Radian6 (which Opus Research will be discussing in some depth in a forthcoming report on “The Social Contact Center) makes it clear that the company is ready to work with its clients to help them do a better job of helping existing clients “listen to feedback from clients and prospects across multiple talkpaths in order to respond quickly and strengthen social bonds.

There is no “time certain” for the IPO. It was amended in April 2011 with the notation that an offer would happen “As soon as practicable after this registration statement becomes effective.” But we would think the success of Linked, with an anemic topline and negative bottom line, would signal a hunger from buyers for companies with positive operational results. What’s more, annual interest expense in excess of $250 million should give THL and Quadrangle incentive to recapitalize in an expeditious manner.

NAR is the organization behind the REALTOR service mark. The package, which is described on this in the REALTOR.org Web site, was designed jointly by the NAR and Ifbyphone. It helps agents optimize their advertising/spending by using call tracking to discover the source of leads. More importantly it uses ifbyphone’s cloud-based voice and call processing resources to serve as a “virtual contact center,” complete with interactive voice response (to screen callers and perform rudimentary call distribution), voice messaging and call forwarding to reach mobile agents.

Since its launch in 2005. IfByPhone has successfully added features and functions to its cloud-based service delivery platform. Eighteen months ago, we posted this story about a three-tiered offering which, at the time, included Telephony API-based voice mashups (for do-it-yourselfers), “Rent-an-App-and-Integrate,” for tech-savvy businesses ready to take a hybrid approach to “Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs) and “Stage 3″ – which Opus Research now calls “Voice in the Cloud”.

As we noted back then, the competition for Voice in the Cloud comes from the likes of Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and perhaps Microsoft along with the “pure plays” like West Interactive, Voxeo or Angel.com. It is also becoming a domain where enterprise infrastructure providers (especially Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya) are pursuing a “hybrid” approach to supporting multi-channel contact center strategies with “hosted” partners like SpanLink or Teletech. All-in-all, when you include CRM, call tracking, marketing optimization and the other key elements of Conversational Commerce, it is easy to see how “Voice in the Cloud” is foundational to a category of enterprise spending that will exceed $10 billion in 2011.

The acquisition marks an acceleration of West’s mobile strategy. Smoothstone’s value proposition has evolved over the years. For much of the time it served as a single-point-of-contact for medium sized firms with multiple-sites and multiple vendors to work with as they migrate to IP-based platforms. The company lists both Cisco and Avaya as its strategic partners in the managed services channel. What has set it apart more recently is its relationship with Sprint, characterized as “a strategic alliance to bring mobile workers the functionality of a cloud-based PBX” over the carrier’s wireless broadband network.

Smoothstone extends its clients’ enhanced communications capabilities to mobile employees through its Mobile Connect product. Its downloadable apps for both iOS (Apple) and Android-based phones enable users to take advantage of the company’s PBX-like features, including access to the corporate directory, abbreviated dialing to other employees, long-distance and international calls at the corporate rate, voice mail and conferencing.

As noted above, West will continue to have two distinct lines of business for its multiple business units. Smoothstone joins the Unified Communciations group which houses Conferencing and outbound Alerts and Notifications, as well as System Integration and Consulting. For the record, West’s financial statements show that UC, for the first time, is more than half of the revenues of the parent company (exceeding $1.2 billion in revenue in 2010 – up 8%, compared to Communiations Services’ (CS) $1.17 billion in revenues and a 6% decline). More importantly, UC is proving to be more profitable than CS, with roughly 60% operating margins, compared to closer to 50% for CS. With the acquisition of Smoothstone the center of gravity for West Corporation is destined to move toward general managed IP-based services.

As for contact center and self-service businesses over in CS, everyone should take heart in the fact that, in the world of Conversational Communications, traditional contact center functions – customer acquisition, customer support, upsell/cross-sell, and all that – going enterprise-wide (and beyond). Conversations between and among employees, customers, prospects and “influencers” take place on a plethora of platforms and the synthetic division between UC and CS will be a challenge to maintain. By having experience, customers and products in both camps, West is in a good position to manage how enterprise-wide IP-based assets can be brought into the talk paths between its clients, their employees and their customers.

The dual engine approach delivers higher levels of accuracy than prior releases, but more importantly it provides for greater flexibility design, installation, administration of voice authentication. VoiceVault solutions can be deployed on a customer’s premises, in a hosted mode or in a hybrid approach designed to support mobile devices and tablets.

Regarding mobile: VoiceVault and Opus Research will be announcing the winner of the Mobile Voice Biometric Challenge at Voice Biometrics Conference 2011-Amsterdam.

West has partnered with TFCC for roughly fifteen years and the companies are well acquainted with one another. West will position TFCC’s services as part of its Unified Communications segment, where the foundational acquisitions include Intercall (for conferencing), West Notifications Group (which is tightly knit with multi-modal alert company Televox) and SKT Business Communications Solutions, which was acquired in August 2010 to provide the professional services and project management skills that make it possible to knit together cloud-based solutions with enterprise IT infrastructure.

The acquisition signals that West Corp. is well-aware that outbound alerts, in all their modalities are one of the largest opportunities among so-called Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs). TFCC’s niche, of high-volume call handling and notification is a near-perfect application for hosted services because they provide an automated, resource “on-call” for times when spikes in call traffic occur by definition. Providers of such services customarily charged a fixed monthly fee for keeping guaranteeing call-handling capacity during times of emergency and these charges make for a nice annuity for service providers.

Dating back to its acquisition of CenterPost Communications (which customized notification services to suit the whims of United Airlines customers and passengers), West learned that the ability to customize intelligent alerts is both a differentiator and a source of professional services revenues. The acquisition of TFCC positions West to garner the full spectrum of revenues: Non-recurring professional services, annuity and activity-based while leveraging both home-grown and acquired assets, clients and experience.