In March 2008, as noted in this post, Microsoft took an equity position in Aspect and made it the first among equals in its enterprise contact center strategy. On January 11, as a matter of reciprocity, Aspect formally launched its Aspect Unified IP 7 Platform fulfilling on its promise to support multimodal, collaborative customer care throughout the enterprise by embedding deep integration of Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Dynamics (CRM).

The announcement served the god of product continuity while fulfilling on the promises of platform agnosticism (supporting both Cisco ICM and Genesys, for instance) and constantly expanding features and capability. Existing Aspect customers will be pleased to find that the new products and services are organized into Aspect’s customary lines of business, including a voice portal platform that supports inbound, outbound and blended interactions; workforce optimization; and the very popular collections and “streamlined collections” applications. Aspect IP 7 adds support of IM, email and chat (all under the purview of the Workforce Management resources), making it a single platform for inbound, outbound, chat, Email, SMS, IM and IVR, as well as quality and workflow management.

In a conference call last week Aspect executives, including Gary Barnett and Serge Hyppolite laid claim to some capabilities that distance Aspect from its competitors. The UC applications that were showcased include: “Seamless Customer Service, which starts with a Voice Portal but transfers calls based on rules supported by its “Ask an Expert” routine, including the ability to connect to the agent with whom the caller has most recently spoken.

Beyond the applications announcements, Aspect revealed some very interesting metrics. Looking at the prior years sales, revenue is split as 35% inbound, 35% “blended”, and 30% outbound. What’s more “Unified IP” has accounted for 44% of its sales. Another bit of background from the preview call was the description of “distributed call center” or network of gateways to promote scalability. “Gateways” are in Bangalore, New York City and London with a Contact Center ACD operating in Miami. I don’t know the complete details, but it sounds like there’s a cloud-based strategy for Aspect in there somewhere. Coupled with Microsoft’s strong commitment to Office 365 and Lync Online cloud-based” implementations of Unified IP 7 are a natural way to scale up and go global simultaneously.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Unified Communications, Aspect, Contact Center