Aspect Software issued a press release today in conjunction with its North American User Group meeting that it is re-positioning the company's solutions as unified communications for the contact center. A bold statement and, at least for the time being, one that is as much about marketing as it is about delivered solutions.
Aspect Software issued a press release today in conjunction with its North American User Group meeting that it is re-positioning the company's solutions as unified communications for the contact center. A bold statement and, at least for the time being, one that is as much about marketing as it is about delivered solutions.Having said that, the marketing aspects (pun intended) of this announcement are laudatory. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Here "'em" are the communications and IT market leaders that beat the Unified Communications drum day in and day out.
To Aspect's credit, they recognized a hole in all the UC hoo-hah. Avaya, under the Intelligent Communications marketing theme, positions UC, contact center and CEBP solutions separately. Cisco lumps contact center in with all its other UC solutions. Microsoft and IBM, while alluding to contact center interactions in a lot of their material, don't actually deliver specific UC solutions for the contact center.
These vendors left the field wide open for Aspect to come along and capitalize on the unified communications groundwork that has been done: Yes, go to one of these companies for your UC, they say, but continue to come to Aspect for your contact center solutions. We continue to be the contact center experts, and we'll make sure that the UC solution you choose works in the contact center as well.
Aspect expects to deliver their flagship solution, Aspect Unified IP, with initial UC capabilities in the second half of 2008. Two more releases, a V2 and V3, will come in the first half of 2009 and will add UC capabilities to the company's workforce optimization solutions. Aspect users at the conference in Atlanta this week will have the opportunity to see the proof of concept demo, interoperability of Aspect Unified IP with Microsoft's OCS 2007.
