A year ago, Aspect Software made a bold move, re-positioning the company's solutions as UC for the contact center. That was quickly followed by an announcement from the stage at VoiceCon that Microsoft had entered into a multi-year strategic alliance with Aspect Software. Today, Aspect takes its belief that UC is the future of the communications software business one step further, announcing essentially that they have re-organized their portfolio of solutions into a set of six UC applications.Aspect's UC applications have names that attempt to characterize what they do, for example Seamless Customer Service. More importantly it includes, in one license price, the components required to deliver a combination of self-service and assisted service. No extra charges for reporting solutions, design tools, CTI integration or agent desktop applications. The UC "kicker" in this particular application is the inclusion of Aspect's recently announced Ask an Expert capability, which allows agents to reach out to colleagues in the rest of the business on Microsoft OCS to help with contact center inquiries.
Is Aspect the first company to package its solutions in a single license? No. One difference I see is architectural. Aspect has certainly taken its hits over the past few years for having a collection of ACDs, dialers and workforce solutions from a number of different acquisitions. Over time, Aspect has ported that best of each of these solutions to a Microsoft .NET web services environment, allowing them to share reporting, administrative and design assets.
The other difference I see is commitment. A year ago, Cisco announced a new licensing scheme called Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing (CUWL) that similarly bundles in one license a collection of capabilities. Talking to end user consulting firms, it's clear that both they and customers have embraced CUWL and Cisco continues to add to and refine the CUWL story. Others have tried less successfully to market "editions" of their products with much less success.
I would liken Aspect's approach to Cisco's. As Aspect SVP Mike Sheridan said on a call with industry analysts this week to preview the announcement, "This is the way we are going to market going forward with our products." That's not to say that customers won't be able to add licenses for specific Aspect solutions they may own. What it does say is that Aspect is committed to trying to fundamentally change the way they go to market.
I'm reminded of the last line of a blog I wrote last week, "Seems like an application-based world really is beginning to emerge." More and more every week it would appear.
