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).

A group of technology executives with representatives from Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, among others, has launched a research initiative to study various biometric technologies and how they could be used to discourage fraudsters’ efforts at identity theft or account take-over. While a number of banks around the world are already trialing or piloting biometric-based authentication for both online and call center-based access, as evident from this report in SearchFinancialSecurity.com, adoption and deployment has been plagued by a lack of understanding.

As part of its long-standing plans for global expansion, Enghouse Systems Limited, parent company for Syntellect, completed its acquisition of Trio AB, an enterprise solutions provider founded in 1992. Trio provides voice processing and call processing platforms for enterprises in Scandinavia. While it was founded in 1992, it had been acquired by Teligent AB in 2006 as a premises-based offering from a value added service provider. Teligent put Trio up for sale in late 2008.

In a brief story in the back of its “Open Dialog” newsletter, Siemens Enterprise Communications’ analyst relations folks mention a “UC in the Cloud” proof of concept showcase at the company’s booth at VoiceCon 2009. Visitors will see how the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, which has been operated by Amazon.com for about three years now, can support a multiplicity of functions that are touted by the vendors of enterprise “unified communications” (UC) solutions. We would prefer to frame it as a “voice-in-the-cloud” offering because it adds intelligent call routing, message management and presence-based status indicators to multi-site, multi-vendor environments. Relying on Amazon Web Services means that the whole package is highly scalable and can be offered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

According to a press release, Voice Application Hosting innovator Voxeo is taking the future back to the past in a very effective way. One of the enhancements to its Tropo.com API-based development platform is support of the venerable COBOL programming language. While some people may refer to it as spaghetti, Voxeo CEO notes that “COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language.” He accurately adds that “[b]anks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations” and that these “legacy programs can immediately become speech enabled without any further effort.”