AT&T has stepped up efforts to offer medium-sized companies a pay-as-you-go option for contact center operations. Under the Hosted Integrated Contact Services (HICS), AT&T provides a way for companies to have inbound calls “take advantage of intelligent call routing, IVR applications and/or web-media capabilities (email, chat, fax).” To accomplish these objectives on its customers’ behalf, AT&T is deploying the major components of GCIP, the Genesys Customer Interaction Portal, which was fully integrated into the Genesys platform with the acquisition of SDE (a spin-off of German telephony application development specialist, VoicInt).

We’ve been watching and waiting for a major North American roll-out of GCIP since Genesys acquired SDE in January. We were given a headsup on an impending offer by AT&T of CCIP at Analysts Conference that Genesys held in San Francisco that month. Now AT&T has formally launched the service and will be stepping up its marketing efforts at G-Force, the Genesys User Forum in Orlando next week. The whole purpose of GCIP is to simplify the process and therefore shorten the time it takes for medium-sized enterprises to create and manage call processing and voice processing associated with well-understood customer care activities.

AT&T’s Web site,provides a full list of the functions that its offering supports. At base, it provides a Web page through which customer care managers can build routing schemes and control “Network ACD” functions, such as intelligent queuing, skills-based routing and the like. Call routing can be SIP/IP based, legacy TDM or a hybrid of the two.

HICS also provides the ability to build and deploy speech applications ranging from simple announcements to VoiceXML-based IVR (interactive voice response). Speech-enabled applications can deploy either Nuance or IBM engines.

As an aside, we were taken aback by forecasted numbers from Gartner that are included in AT&T’s press release. In the cited report , Gartner saw enterprise spending in North America for “Hosted Contact Center Market” reaching $175 million in 2009. We’re not sure what is included in that number, but if you look at the hosted self service offerings from the likes of West, Convergys, Tellme, FirstData Voice, Nuance On Demand, Voxeo and AT&T’s cohort of North American carriers, like Qwest, Verizon Business, EchoPass and a few others, we see a market that exceeded $500 million in 2008 and drove another $175 million in professional services for integration and application development.

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