I listened to a replay of Aspect’s Sr. Vice President of Strategy Mike Sheridan’s Webinar for industry analysts. Aside from imparting surprisingly good news about revenues in the final quarter, the biggest take-away was Aspect’s unswerving commitment to Unified Communications in general and Microsoft’s flavor of UC specifically. The former means that Aspect expects to transcend the confines of the contact center and go enterprise-wide. The latter signals that its approach is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s .Net architecture as well as sales of Exchange Server, Active Directory and (oh yeah!) Office Communications Server 2007 R2, which includes OCS Voice for SIP-based call handling and the vestiges of Microsoft SpeechServer, called its “Developer Edition.”

“UC changes everything,” Sheridan noted. That’s a statement that is more true for Aspect than any other company in the Conversational Access Technologies community. Last year, Microsoft made a major investment in Aspect, largely as a stalking horse in the contact center and voice self-service domain. Aspect has responded with major rebranding effort, retooling of the product line and retraining of its sales force and technicians to work toward a new paradigm for customer care and a new concept for contact centers.

In another striking phrase, Sheridan said “There’s no room for agnosticism” in the UC world. By that he was distinguishing Aspect’s approach to UC, which involves tight integration with Microsoft’s middleware and servers, from the myriad of competitors who, by Aspect’s standards, use the term loosely to mean “communications enabling business processes to promote presence, collaboration and efficiency.” Where others see a move to UC as part of a strategy for extending the life of existing infrastructure components, Microsoft and Aspect aim to accelerate their demise.

Accordingly, Sheridan says they are not actively selling their legacy software. Instead they are shifting to a strategy that involves licensing, integration and support of software (including some prepackaged applications) that results in a 20% per-seat savings on licensing and 10% savings on ongoing maintenance when compared with the street price for current solutions from the likes of Avaya, Genesys, Cisco and Aspect.

It’s a risky strategy, but it is one that’s true to the Microsoft imprimatur. (Recall that Microsoft and Aspect formed an alliance in March 2008 in which Microsoft took an equity position in Aspect.) All businesses that are vested in Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory to support internal mail and messaging and operate innumerable servers that conform to the .Net architecture are greenfield opportunities for Aspect’s sales efforts. Aspect’s salespeople and technical force have been retrained to support implementations of Microsoft’s key servers. As for interactive voice response (IVR) and voice self-service resources, Aspect’s Voice Portal remains part of the Unified IP product line, but customers also could deploy Microsoft OCS for premises-based and Tellme Networks for hosted speech applications.

Although substantial revenues from UC services and software won’t click in until the second half of 2009, Sheridan told us that the company expects licensing, time and materials to reach 30% of revenue in the coming year.

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