Aspect announced today it has acquired Quilogy, an IT services firm headquartered in the greater St. Louis, MO area. Around since 1993, Quilogy is a systems integrator that specializes in Microsoft platforms, with a special focus on Microsoft SharePoint, described by Aspect as Microsoft's fastest-growing server product. Quilogy also brings vertical industry experience in healthcare and the public sector. Over 200 former Quilogy professionals, including 170 Microsoft-certified engineers, will operate as a subsidiary of Aspect, bringing the company's total employee number to 1,900+.The fact that my briefing was conducted by Quilogy's Ted Perrotte, National Practice Manager, SharePoint Solutions (and Aspect's Andy Bezaitis, SVP Corp. Dev.) highlights the attention that was being paid to Quilogy's SharePoint intellectual assets as a rationale for the acquisition. I'll admit I didn't know much about SharePoint, and so I decided to educate myself.
The graphic shows where SharePoint fits in the overall Microsoft scheme today. If you're like me, that doesn't help a lot in terms of understanding why Aspect thinks it's important. But, if you look at some of the advanced information that's become available about Office 2010, it becomes more clear. SharePoint 2010 Server will be joined by SharePoint Workspace 2010 (formerly Groove). SharePoint Workspace will make it easier to access SharePoint content. So SharePoint is about the sharing and updating of documents, i.e., collaboration.
Which brings us back to Aspect's acquisition of Quilogy. If you believe that UC and collaboration are coming together (everything points in that direction) and you've already bought into Microsoft UC in a big way (as Aspect clearly has), it makes sense to be prepared to help customers join OCS and SharePoint. Specifically, Aspect says the some of the benefits of the acquisition will come from applying UC and collaboration capabilities to its existing applications:
* Extending the capabilities of our Ask an Expert capability by enabling agents to search for experts using a keyword search of archived documents and conversations to improve first call resolution.
* Tying survey results to individual customer--post call surveys, emails/notifications created in SharePoint becomes part of the customer record.
* Using portals and enterprise search to bring additional enterprise content and analytics into the contact center.
* Creating workflows that integrate traditional and web-based transactions using web forms in SharePoint.
Aspect continues to gamble on Microsoft, and its future success as a communications provider. This move can almost be seen as a doubling down move--increasing the stakes on the Microsoft bet.
