It’s always good to hear some exotic news in the sometimes slow contact center industry. I mean, enough of the French (a la Alcatel-Lucent), right?!
Ottawa-based Pronexus is not a big company by any means, but it is focused on providing the best IVR development tool for the Dialogic hardware and Microsoft .NET platform — VBVoice. It also offers professional services in application development and consulting. And thanks to the Bludis partnership, it now has a greater international reach with Bludis becoming a value added distributor of VBVoice.
Here is the official press release:
OTTAWA, ON– Pronexus, now entering its 16th year of operation and the developer of VBVoice, the leading Rapid Application Development (RAD) Toolkit for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications, announced today that it has entered a strategic partnership with Bludis, an Italian Value Added distributor specializing in software distribution.
“This agreement illustrates Pronexus´ commitment to meeting the needs of our Italian customers,” said Henrique Carvalho. “We have witnessed a growing demand for VBVoice in this market and Bludis´ proven record to deliver results makes them an excellent partner of Pronexus.”
Bludis operates through a channel of more than 5,000 resellers, VARS and System Integrators, providing a widespread presence in Italy. They employ dedicated regional account managers, presales engineers, technical product managers who will be marketing, selling and supporting VBVoice 5.6.2, the newest release.
“As a Dialogic distributor, we receive daily requests for an IVR toolkit that is easy to use with Dialogic boards and VoIP software, while at the same time providing a seamless integration with the .NET environment,” said Marco Finocchi, Product Manager Enteprise Communications of Bludis. “With this partnership, VBVoice completes our product line with a toolkit that leverages familiar programming skills and shortens the learning curve.”
VBVoice is already used by developers in Italy, in addition to thousands of developers around the world, to create sophisticated IVR applications that are presently deployed in banks, airports and call centers. VBVoice has been named the “Product of the Year” for the past 14 years by numerous industry publications and was recently awarded the 2009 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award presented by Technology Marketing Corporation´s Internet Telephony magazine.
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About Pronexus:
Since 1993, Pronexus has delivered proven voice applications and IVR development tools that developers rely on to help them integrate voice with business systems, including unified communications, customer relationship management and field service automation systems. Let us show you how we can help you reduce the time, cost and complexity of deploying speech and telephony technology by visiting our web site: http://www.pronexus.com.
For a complete history and list of awards please visit: http://www.pronexus.com/english/View.asp?x=356
About Bludis:
Bludis is an Italian Value Added Distributor of information technology. Bludis have long experience in trading with quality products and services, and is specialized in areas like Communication, Security, IT Management and Integrated Document Management. Technical know-how is of the highest level and distinguishes Bludis from other distributors because it allows the company to support its customers in complex projects with seriousness and professional dedication. Bludis is ISO 9001/2000 certified and the quality control system implemented in the organization ensures compliance to requirements in all company fields, in order to reach customer satisfaction.
Bludis Contact Information
Headquarters: Viale Battista Bardanzellu 8, 00155 Rome, Italy
Email: marketing@bludis.it
Phone: +39 0643230.265
Fax: +39 0643230.088
Website: http://www.bludis.it
Who doesn’t love SIP these days? Companies big and small these days are high on sipping. With that came a market for SIP trunking for wider adoption and cost savings, and border demarcation (i.e. Session Border Control) for security and conversion.
SIP trunking services are offered by the ISPs and IP carriers. Forget about the PSTN to merge your corporate telephony network — go with SIP trunks and all of your enterprise phones could talk to each other in a short time. Of course, that’s assuming you’ve deployed a trusty VoIP solution.
But when the VoIP call has to go outside of the corporation, what happens? That’s when media gateways and session border controllers (SBCs) come to play. Media gateways are normally sold by the telephony vendors as well, especially the traditional TDM PBX vendors because of their migration path to VoIP. The new market where money is made is in VoIP border control and security. Right now Acme Packet leads the pack in that area, but others like Dialogic are starting to salivate over that piece of pie…
It appears that Dialogic is planning to stuff every feature possible into a new gateway product — in essence, “Lord of the Gateways”:
We are in the process of developing a new product which we are currently calling the Dialogic Border Gateway. The Dialogic Border Gateway will enable the connection of virtually any type of network trunk, either a PSTN Trunk or a SIP Trunk, with virtually any premise based PBX, legacy TDM PBX, hybrid PBX, or IP-PBX. The Border Gateway will also provide the required security functions to establish a demarcation point between the enterprise network edge and the service provider network. In future posts I will provide more detail on the Border Gateway product as well as some addition insight into the SIP Trunking market. I welcome others to share their insights in these areas as well.
Wow, can it also vacuum my house?! This will be a gateway to end all gateways. Details are still vague, but definitely keep an eye on this one.
In a couple of weeks I will be in Orlando to cover VoiceCon — hoping to bring you the latest in VoIP and UC. The big names will all be there, but I’m hoping to find some gems from the lesser known vendors.
Please let me know if you are also attending, or have news or press release relating to VoiceCon. Embargoes will be honored, of course. I’m also interested in demos of your latest products. While I’ll try my best to meet and greet, feel free to ping me to schedule some face time. Or, should the opportunity arise, over beers.
Bring your iPhone and load up the LinkedIn app — I’ve been dying to try the “In Person” feature… See you at VoiceCon!
The gloves are starting to come off between these major contact center and telecom vendors.
As Avaya digests its Nortel platter, Aspect, a primary competitor, takes no time to stir up the FUD sentiment relating to the merger. Aspect’s Mike Ely, Director of System Architecture, jabs at Avaya’s SIP and UC roadmaps:
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The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.
Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform? In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides. They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.
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To which Jon Alperin of Avaya politely responds:
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Over 8 years ago, Avaya formalized the DevConnect Program to provide third parties with the technical support, resources and compliance testing programs necessary to deliver innovative joint solutions with a recognized level of interoperability. This extends to providing our customers, channels and support teams with the documentation and configuration information necessary to allow successful implementations.
To paraphrase a comment made at the 2009 VoiceCon show in Orlando, if you know who your members are and what they are doing, you really don’t have a developer program. Well, DevConnect has certainly grown to become a true developer program, with over 10,000 companies developing more solutions than we can even imagine. In fact, DevConnect is recognized by leading analysts including Gartner, Canalys and The Yankee Group as an important strength in Avaya’s market leadership position. With the addition of Nortel’s portfolio, DevConnect supports over 170 different open interfaces across more than 40 products or platforms.
We don’t think of SIP as simply a protocol. To Avaya, SIP is the underpinning of an entire architectural model, inclusive of endpoint devices, network interconnections with Service Providers, and for providing new flexibility in connecting the right applications to the right people.
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We recognize that our customers rely heavily on contact center and Unified Communications applications to run their business, and that there is a cost to migrating fully functioning and useful applications from older, well established APIs such as TSAPI/JTAPI to any other protocol. So we don’t force them to do this. Instead we enable them to gain the advantages of SIP, including access to rich presence-based information, by allowing them to gently introduce SIP into their network architectures where and when it makes financial sense to do so for their unique situations.
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There’s no winner to declare here. Both have made valid arguments and good points. However, the volley of blog posts between Aspect and Avaya gives us a glimpse of how traditional telecom vendors are dealing with the ever evolving communications landscape — in this case, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) — and the realities of the business world.
Aspect has always been focused on contact center technologies, from the ACD to CTI to workforce management to UC. It knows contact center software. It has always billed itself as a software company and has consistently placed in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant in recent years for worldwide contact center infrastructure. Being a software company it knows the importance of interoperability and platform and standards. That’s why it also has an intimate partnership with the world’s largest software company, Microsoft. In fact, the Redmond Giant has an unspecified equity stake in Aspect, ensuring that Microsoft will always have an entry point into the contact center business and not just enterprise communications (via its Office Communications Server offering). Transitioning to something like SIP is almost a natural course of progression for Aspect — just get the engineers to tweak some code and be done! Next standard, please!
Avaya, on the other hand, has a history of spin-offs and mergers. It was spun-off from Lucent’s business communications division. It was privatized by two well-known equity firms. It then won the bid for Nortel’s Enterprise Communications division. The company has always been about selling the box (hardware) as much as what’s inside it (software). It was also successful in dominating the contact center business with its PBXs and servers thanks to its developer-friendly DevConnect Program which allows third parties to create applications surrounding its communications platform. Moving from traditional TDM applications to SIP-based ones weren’t as simple for Avaya and its peers (e.g. Nortel). Most of the time it required additional boxes to enable the SIP solution, and thinking hard about what products are worth the additional resources to IP-enable them and how to satisfy existing customers who weren’t ready for IP.
The bottom line? Software-centric vendors like Aspect believes that it is the hare compared to the tortoise that is Avaya (and an even slower tortoise with Nortel on board). We all know how the old fable ended. But in today’s dynamic competitive business environment, the hares know better not to nap and the tortoises know to wear skates.
And I’m awaiting Cisco’s response…
Today’s guest post is by Tony Tillyer who is a seasoned CTI professional and currently works at T-Mobile UK. Even if you’ve never met Tony, you probably recognize his name, especially if you’ve been dabbling in Genesys long enough. Tony is the author of several Genesys “Rough Guides” — semi-official documentation compiled by him with input from others based on hands-on experiences, an active forum moderator on the Genesys CTI User Forum, and one of the driving forces behind The Wire Magazine. It just happens that he’s in the middle of developing an article for The Wire which fits as a response to yesterday’s post, “Is VoIP a diversion?” Thanks for sharing and allowing us a preview, Tony!
VoIP is a natural progression in IT terms. IP serves web pages, video streams, voice streams and all manner of media – so why not apply it to replace telco (TDM)? Well, if it is for business purposes and you’ve got a call centre to kit out, here’s a few thoughts:
VoIP/SIP does not have the service levels of TDM. TDM has an excellent track record since the majority of it is hard wired — and it’s been around for over a hundred years! If you pick up your deskphone handset you expect the dial tone, every time — right? What about if you switch on your PC, log in, plug in your headphones, open your softphone, log in… do you have the same expectations…? Does it always work…? I think that’s 1-0 for TDM… And, even when it works if you get the bandwidth, the priority (QoS) or configuration wrong, you can drop “packets” making it impossible to understand the caller — probably worse than not receiving the call in the first place!
If TDM is already there, it will always be there. What is the backup strategy for VoIP/SIP? If you have built VoIP/SIP where TDM previously existed, the chances are you left the TDM equpment in place, ”just in case” eveything goes pear-shaped. So — TDM is still there.
Out with the old, in with the new. If you are planning a new site, chances are you will go with VoIP/SIP, since it doesn’t have the price tag of TDM — no PBX, no ACD, no hard wires around the building, no turrets… and you would take the service level “hit” in your stride since you do not have a higher expectation of the service and you factor that in to your build.
VoIP/SIP is more versatile. Take Call Forwarding for example, using TDM it’s a standard affair: “Forward calls to xxxx…” With VoIP/SIP there are endless possibilities — working from home today? No problem — just log in at home… On the move? No problem — just log in when you get there… VoIP/SIP is “in the cloud” and is not tied down to a single location like TDM.
VoIP/SIP fits in seemlessly with the advances in other areas of telco technology. IVRs with Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS), (V)XML, IP convergence — all of it requires a conversion from/to TDM — VoIP/SIP is there, already.
VoIP/SIP opens so many doors from a provider perspective. With the technology “in the cloud” the real estate resides elsewhere. You can tie in IVR, payment services, automated responses and all manner of things not possible with simple TDM — and all of it is off-site, being maintained by service professionals ready to provide an instant service to any customer.
The business impact of VoIP/SIP over TDM. If you have TDM and you want to rip it out, you are essentially removing the telco provider (switch, ACD, etc.) and replacing them with a single cable and an IT department. That’s over a hundred years of experience being replaced by the new boys over in the IT section. Are you sure you want to do that?!
In essence then, if you have TDM, stick with it — no point in using it as a back-up for a new technology, because it will be (ultimately) more costly. If you are planning a new site with the possibility to continually expand (and contract!) – why not use VoIP/SIP?
