SHEILA McGEE-SMITH
President & Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics
Ms. McGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises. Her insight helps them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today's consumer and business customers.
Ms. McGee-Smith has spent over twenty years in the communications industry, including 12 years with The PELORUS Group, most recently as Director, Call Center and Operator Services. Her professional accomplishments include:
* Author of multi-client market research studies in the areas of contact centers and customer relationship management published, by The PELORUS Group.
* Frequent speaker at communications industry conferences, user group meetings and sales meetings.
* Strategic consultant to companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to start-ups assessing the competitive environment for telephony products and services, including custom research reports, sales force training and white papers.
* Quoted authority on news and trends in the communications market.
Prior to joining The PELORUS Group, Ms. McGee-Smith held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex and Dun & Bradstreet. She received a bachelor's degree, cum laude, from Barnard College, Columbia University, majoring in psychology and an MBA, awarded with distinction, majoring in marketing and management information systems from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Blog Entries by Sheila McGee-Smith
Helping with a competition to pick, "two truly transformational proposals so big that, when implemented, could secure prosperity and jobs for Ireland."
Where customers want to go directly to SIP carriers from the branch, the built-in SIP trunking will be very attractive.
Joint customers, numbering in excess of 150 companies, want the applications of the two companies to work together as seamlessly as technology will allow.
Genesys’ iWD solution is helping generate customer excitement and revenue in enterprise--versus contact center--applications, which is one of the goals of the reorganization.
There were hints that the Genesys brand, far from being lost, may be extended to ALU vendor-independent UC applications. Stay tuned.
With its commanding contact center market share, it would have been easy for Avaya to arrogantly stick with its own products, scuttling Nortel's portfolio at the first opportunity. They didn't do that.
This move can almost be seen as a doubling down move--increasing the stakes on Aspect's Microsoft bet.
A CMO's dream global launch for the new Avaya.
At the time of the acquisition, Nortel's Enterprise business was around $1.5 billion. That makes it about half the size it was in 2006.
Revenue earned in early phases of the deployment funds successive phases.
Open source is not just for SMB customers.
The big news during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote address was the announcement of a new salesforce "cloud," Chatter.
It uses a softphone interface but has its own chipset so that when the PC's CPU is churning to open an application, this won't cause audio degradation.
A video where I wrap up impressions of the Cisco Collaboration Summit.
In the past month, Kraft has become an Avaya Aura Session Manager user. Here are some of the tidbits we learned about the decision.
If your business runs a contact center, and chances are very high that if you're coming to VoiceCon it does, plan to leave the bar a little early Wednesday night and join the discussion.
The traditional interaction between a company and an outsourcer has been largely manual. The LiveWork APIs are a step towards standardizing this process.
Because the stalking horse won the auction, the integration planning that has been taking place at Avaya and Nortel can continue to be fine-tuned and expanded upon.
Given Telstra's historical dominance in an increasingly competitive market, this new agreement is a big win for Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise division.
After years of build-up, it appears clear that speech technology in the contact center has become mainstream.
Did I multi-task during the 90 minutes? Yes, but no more than I do during a typical in-person analyst conference.
Spanlink helps Interactive go up-market and Interactive Intelligence gives Spanlink an attractive mid-market play.
We really like some of the Nortel assets, and hope they will find a place at Avaya.
the one-X Agent application will evolve to become Avaya's common client for all enterprise contact center applications, which will mean an easier migration path for customers.
The company's contact center story is wholly consistent with the broader Mitel story.
The accelerating convergence between IT and telecom is a prevalent theme.
Siemens will integrate a solution from its sister company, SER.
There's lots to like about Avaya's announcement today around its mid-size contact center offer.
It is nice to be able to participate in some of the highlights of Interop without the time and expense of being there.
I'm reminded that Nortel made its way into the US market in the mid-1980s during a technology shift similar to the current shift.
Leading-edge SIP-based network and software solutions are hitting a capital expenditure-challenged market ready to not only consider but implement them.
This strategic partnership has the potential to be big. AT&T owns a lot of contact center account relationships.
I ended up reading the entire article and learning some things about LiveOps I didn't know before.
The cost saving message is being heavily played by Avaya
While Nortel is delivering a solid new release, with some great capabilities, it has taken almost four years.
CosmoCom calls this its "most far reaching and significant set of enhancements and additions to the vendor's unified IP contact center suite in its history."
The goal of DDS is to allow an enterprise to apply consistent policies across multiple channels of customer interaction.
Alcatel-Lucent recognizes the opportunities that stimulus funding could have for its business
These developments may (should?) help define the direction of future application development.
They have re-organized their portfolio of solutions into a set of six UC applications.
Shouldn't patients be able to call one number and talk to one person to understand what insurance would cover, pay the hospital bill and schedule the next appointment?
Genesys is now poised to be an important part of getting the rest of Alcatel-Lucent onboard.
The move seems to reinforce two recent trends: continuing consolidation in the contact center space and the increasing importance of analytics to the overall contact center application suite.
Once the counting is done, 2008 is sure to be the year that IP agent shipments surpassed TDM for the first time.
The press release states that ALU intends to reduce the number of managers by 1,000. While that may initially sound like a lot, turns out there are 50K managers in their employee base of approximately 70K.
A capability is being built into Cisco's CUCM will enable presence and other data sharing between trusted companies, such as partners and customers.
Vendors need forward-looking organizations to help them test the limits of new technologies. Kudos to Alcatel-Lucent and Abilene Christian University for working together to begin delivering on the promise of UC.
Unlike earlier Microsoft presentations at VoiceCon, the importance of partners was not highlighted. No mention of Nortel or Aspect or anyone else by name.
They may not call it UC, and none of the likely suspects may be involved (Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Siemens, Microsoft, etc.), but Convergys has one heck of a lot of agents using instant messaging and speech-to-text applications every day.
There are a number of interesting attributes that jump out of a quick perusal of Kevin Kennedy’s background:...
THE HOT ZONE
A focus on burning issues in Enterprise Communications
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