The story of the day is the roadmap launched today by Avaya to explain its plan for rationalizing the Avaya and Nortel voice portfolios. I'm sure that there will be a number of stories written for No Jitter; as is my wont, here I will highlight the contact center angle on the announcements.The market actually saw a glimmer of today's Avaya Contact Center strategy back in November, during SVP Alan Baratz's keynote address at VoiceCon San Francisco. During that speech, Baratz previewed the Next Generation Contact Center (NGCC) Architecture. He re-visited that topic on today's analyst/press call.
NGCC starts with SIP at the core. As is true for the UC roadmap discussed by Allan Sulkin, Avaya Aura is at the center of the contact center portfolio story. Applications, like outbound dialing and WFO, are brought into interactions as required using SIP and SOA architecture (i.e., Nortel's Agile Communications Environment)--not using CTI as is typically the case today.
Since SIP is inherently multi-modal, the multichannel nature of contact center is supported from the outset. NGCC allows companies to define how sessions with customers are managed, based on information about the caller that is brought with the call (e.g., Caller ID or caller entered digits) and/or by using enterprise data about the caller (e.g., from a CRM system). A rules manager is required that tells Session Manager how calls are to be treated.
Finally, all calls are treated as conferences, not as point to point conversations. Conceptually, this means if you want to add people (like an expert or a supervisor), or resources (like a video feed), these resources are adding like additional callers to a conference call.
It is from the combination of using data to decide what resources to use to address customer needs and the notion of bringing required resources to a conference-type session that Avaya introduces the notion of a Context Center that goes beyond today's contact center.
Baratz went on to say that in terms of embracing these characteristics of NGCC, Nortel was "a bit ahead of Avaya," but labeled the current Nortel Contact Center 7.0 as "primarily a mid-market product." I (as well as many from Nortel) might take issue with that characterization. While it doesn't scale to 7,000 users like Avaya's Call Center Elite, Nortel's ~3,000 agent capacity is more than mid-market. I think the point that Baratz was trying to make is that the intention is to allow Nortel CC 7.0 to scale much higher in the future, enabling it to evolve to become the flagship Avaya contact center solution.
The contact center roadmap calls for Elite to continue for the high end enterprise market, and for the Nortel solution to be adopted for the mid-market (leading to the eventual demise of Avaya's own Contact Center Express purchased just this year from Agile Technologies). From a desktop perspective, over the next 12 months Avaya's one-X Agent and Nortel's CC Agent Desktop will become the NGCC Agent Desktop.
I applaud the decisions made by the integration team on the contact center roadmap. With its commanding contact center market share, it would have been easy for Avaya to arrogantly stick with its own products and directions, scuttling Nortel's portfolio at the first opportunity. Instead, they looked at the available assets and made a thoughtful decision that truly combines the best assets of the two portfolios.
