In this case, the two companies give large, multi-site businesses an opportunity to contract for call handling, IVR and live agents on an “as needed” basis to support new campaigns, unforeseen capacity requirements or the general migration from ol’ school infrastructure to the new era.

This OnDemand offer is decidedly un-siloed. It covers a broad range services and support options. One is “Channel Synchronization”, which provides intelligent queing and routing across traditional telephony, IP Telephony, IVR and live agents. It can also provide estimated wait times and “virtual hold”- based callback options. “Process Optimization” supports Web and phone-based self-service as well as automated responses via email or outbound phone calls. And Teleperformance has built its reputation on agent management, contact center operations and uptime.

Teleperformance’s global footprint is huge. Established in 1978, it operates or manages almost 250 contact centers around the world, with over 82,000 workstations, 100,000 employees and revenues approaching $3 billion. While it is, by no means a Genesys-only shop, Its infrastructure includes about 15,000 instances of Genesys (primarily in North America). Yet, as I point out in this article, Teleperformance makes an excellent channel partner for Genesys, and vice versa.

Financial services is one of Convergys’ key vertical markets. It already claims that “nine out of 10 top commercial banks” leverage its customer care capabilities. This offer provides banks with access to resources that will enable them to scale-up quickly to meet anticipated demand driven by stimulus programs from both the government and private enterprises. It is a combination of specially trained agents, programmable speech-based resources and application logic to support outbound campaigns politely referred to as “early treatment and collections.”

Through IP connectivity, the service also supports both local telephone numbers and toll-free (freephone) numbers within the so-called DACH region (referring to Germany, Austria and Switzerland) where Voxeo, after its acquisition of VoiceObjects, has a number of customers among telephone carriers and financial services providers. The new facilities support traffic on Voxeo’s existing global carrier network and can support both co-location and managed server options for on-LAN deployment of voice application.

Thus evidence continues to mount that hosted and managed services continue to be a counter-cyclical growth area in spite of (or perhaps because of) reduced enterprise spending on both telecommunications and IT infrastructure.

The partnership puts emphasis on flexibility and speed-to-deploy for applications or services that want to add another factor for user authentication. Voxeo has done an excellent job of constantly adding to the tools and capabilities of its platforms. It attracts new developer/partners by constantly adding new tools, capabilities and APIs (application programming interfaces) to its arsenal.

Even though customer service applications are decidedly multimodal these days (involving the Web, email and even Tweets), more than half of ecommerce culminates in a phone call. During these tough financial times, the need to authenticate callers is more acute than ever. Voxeo’s developer community will find that voice signatures are stronger than a PIN (which can be stolen) and more convenient than the challenge questions that “knowledge-based authentication” schemes insert into the call flow.

Financial service providers, payment processors, telecommunications firms and government agencies have been the first to offer high-volume voice biometric based authentication. We’re looking forward to seeing what the fertile minds of the new generation of phone application developers build the better authentication mousetrap for a broader variety of applications and customer groups.