OCS, VoIP, Contact Centers, and the Camel’s Nose
One last observation to wrap up my musings on the Microsoft-Aspect alliance. Tucked into the press release announcing the whole shebang was this curious line:
Aspect plans to extend the interoperability of its Unified IP with Office Communications Server to include software-powered voice in subsequent releases.
I asked Aspect’s Thomas Chamberlain what this actually means. Apparently it’s an oblique reference to the telephony switch that provides basic call control for Aspect’s contact center solution. Right now call control functions are the responsibility of some kind of generic voice switch. In some Aspect documentation I’ve seen Digium’s Asterisk PBX software referenced as providing this function. Going forward the plan seems to be to ditch the switch and instead use OCS’s native VoIP instead.
I’m not sure how to reconcile this with Microsoft’s “VoIP As You Are” advertising message, whose central tenet seems to be to leave business voice systems in place and deploy OCS in conjunction with them. But Microsoft has all along been schizophrenic when it comes to its intentions to either peacefully coexist with or aggressively compete with the PBX establishment. Clearly the company’s long term plan is to mold OCS into a PBX replacement. Replacing traditional voice infrastructure in the heart of the contact center could provide Microsoft with the proverbial nose in the tent. If Microsoft can get businesses comfortable with OCS handling call control in the contact center, it may find the same customers making room for it in the tent where the PBX currently is. This being said, given the business-critical nature of contact centers, it’s going to be a gutsy contact center manager to who starts leaning on Microsoft’s still very new VoIP software as the telephony foundation of his or her customer service environment.
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