One of the less obvious benefits of The Gores Group joint venture with Siemens AG that created Siemens Enterprise Communications Group was the inclusion of another Gores portfolio asset, SER Solutions. At one time known as EIS, in its heyday SER was one of the leaders in the predictive outbound dialing system market. As other outbound leaders were purchased or absorbed by contact center players with broader portfolios (Melita and Davox are part of today's Aspect, Mosaix was acquired by Avaya), SER found itself playing to a relatively small niche market, collections and telemarketing operations.After they purchased SER, The Gores Group installed former Siemens Enterprise president for the US Joe Licata as CEO and President. Under Licata's leadership, SER purchased a small Chicago-based company, SCS, that boasted an all-in-one contact center solution able to support inbound, outbound, and blended interactions as well as digital recording, IVR, and call monitoring. All this ran on SCS's own IP soft switch. Given that SER's current products were primarily TDM outbound solutions, SER's strategy was to use this acquired application, re-branded ENSERCLE, as the migration path for SER's customers running legacy SER solutions.
It is the ENSERCLE solution that Siemens has announced today it will integrate into its OpenScape Contact Center (OSCC) suite of applications in two different versions. As a standalone solution, OSCC Unity is targeted at relatively small collections and insurance claims processing companies, small outsourcers and telemarketing firms. It offers campaign-driven outbound contacts, specialty routing inbound (e.g., routes inbound calls to the outbound CSR that left the message) and integrated call recording. OSCC Campaign Director is available as a standalone outbound application or as part of an inbound contact center, be it Siemens OSCC or the contact center application of some other vendor.
Siemens highlights in the press release that OSCC Unity and OSCC Campaign Director share the open, standards-based architecture that are the "cornerstones of Siemens technology." Not all will benefit from this open architecture however. Last year (pre-JV), Nortel decided to OEM SER Solutions outbound technology and integrate it tightly into their upcoming Contact Center 7.0 release. The SER solution they had selected based on side-by-side testing was SER's CPS Enterprise Edition, CPS E2. ENSERCLE did not yet exist. This should make for an interesting product rationalization discussion if Nortel and Siemens ever become one.
