There's lots to like about Avaya's announcement today around its mid-size contact center offer, Contact Center Express. First and foremost is the purchase by Avaya of the application from its developers, Agile Software of New Zealand. Agile first developed Contact Center Express (CCE) as an Avaya VAR to offer a mid-sized (and lower cost) alternative to Avaya's enterprise contact center offer, Interaction Center. In 2004, Avaya saw the success that Agile was having with the product in its is home region, Asia Pac, and decided to OEM CCE for world-wide distribution.Three years later Avaya purchased German-based Tenovis. Tenovis had a mid-sized contact center solution it had developed and the decision was made to globally launch it as the flagship SMB contact center product, Customer Interaction Express (CIE). The OEM of Agile Software CCE, while never discontinued, was de-emphasized in favor of the Tenovis-based, but Avaya-owned, CIE solution.
Now, in 2009, Avaya is reversing course and re-embracing CCE. The reasons CIE never got traction with partners or customers are not clear, but suffice it to say that contact center management at Avaya has changed and everyone there now is completely behind CCE.
Ownership of the code allows Avaya to create a roadmap for CCE that is exciting. One short term deliverable will be inclusion of CCE in an Avaya Aura Communication Manager-based appliance for the mid-market. Another is mapping CCE data elements to Avaya IQ definitions to allow future reporting migration flexibility.
Owning CCE also changes the decision on how to target the product. When Avaya offered CCE five years ago, they sold it for contact centers with up to 150 agents. Contact Center Express technology was never constrained to that few agents. Above 150, Avaya just preferred to sell its own Interaction Center solution. Now that Avaya owns the CCE code, and can derive direct margins versus OEM margins, they are targeting the application to support up to 400 agents.
Avaya has owned the voice-only contact center market for a decade with its PBX-integrated Call Center Elite solution--market share numbers show them with between 35 and 40 percent during the period. As an increasing number of customers look to add at least some agents with multi-channel capability, CCE has enormous potential. It can be positioned as a relatively simple add-on to the in-place voice capability, sharing common routing through Call Center Elite. With the ability to support up to 400 agents, it could be the solution for some very large voice contact centers that just need a fraction with multi-channel capability.
