What Has Aspect Been Up To? Questions Laid to Rest with the Release of Aspect Unified IP 7

Being an analyst can be fun if you like sports, or chess, or horse racing, because watching different industries develop, merge or morph can be like all those. Some companies will create a new product, feature or concept, and it is adopted and thrives or dies. Sometimes it seems like several companies will develop a new concept almost simultaneously. And, some companies surge ahead, while others fall behind or are acquired for the installed bases or intellectual property.

While watching this horse race or chess board, analysts gossip - I mean, have high level conversations about what is going on in the industry. We like to discuss who might be acquiring who, who is out in front either in sales, marketing, or product development. We talk about their competitors and what their customers are saying. We like to conjecture about what might happen, and I'm sure all of us are sometimes amazed about what does happen.

For example, who would have thought ten years ago that Nortel would become part of Avaya? A decade ago we hadn't heard of social media. A little more than a decade ago we scoffed at Cisco's initial foray into the contact center. We are happy the world has gone to IP. Sometimes we will see a merger happen and say to each other "What are they thinking?" and other times it just makes sense.

Along those lines, I used to say that my area of coverage was contact centers, speech technologies and unified communications. However, after this last year, most of the time I write that I cover unified communications and collaboration, and I constantly reference that UC and the contact center are blending, and social media and speech technologies are being added into the mix.

All this is leading up to what's new with Aspect and the release of the company's Aspect Unified IP 7 platform product this week. For more than a decade, Aspect has provided the analyst community with numerous things to talk about as they moved from being a premier provider of ACD/contact center products, to forming a multi-year alliance with Microsoft, to adding unified communications as a focus. Along the way, they provided a lot of cannon fodder for discussion by acquiring many companies and products, and by frequently changing their marketing focus.

For example, in 2002 Davox (outbound dialing) acquired CELLIT and became Concerto Software. CELLIT's ContactPro product, along with Davox Ensemble formed the basis of Aspect Unified IP. In 2003 Concerto acquired Melita, and in 2004, went on to buy the Rockwell FirstPoint Contact, for its ACD, and in 2005, Aspect Communications (which had acquired the company TCS), changing the name to Aspect Software. Since 2006 Aspect Software has gone onto acquire SophistiCom (quality monitoring and recording), AIM, Blue Note Networks and Quilogy. While certainly not the acquisition juggernauts that Cisco, Nuance and Oracle are, that is a lot of companies and products to incorporate. Competitors have conjectured, as they have with Nuance, that Aspect hasn't done a lot of product development on their own.

Add to this that each year Aspect would change their marketing focus, starting in 2006 with the claim that they were the largest company solely focused on the contact center. The next year, while still embedded in contact centers, the company appeared more focused marketing-wise on performance and analytics. They then jumped into 2008 claiming that they are a company providing UC for the contact center, and last year they added collaboration services and software to that statement. If this all sounds confusing - don't worry - it confused us too.

Aspect Unified IP 7 Emphasizes Aspect's Strategy

People started to talk. What is Aspect up to and do they know what they want to be? I think we can lay these questions to rest this week with the announcement of Aspect Unified IP 7. Two years in the making, Release 7 combines the feature/function of those legacy acquisitions, and satisfies all the functional requirements that the industry has embraced through that combination of UC, contact center, collaboration, and social media. This is a very well thought out release that is not a "me too" release. When I said at the beginning of this article that sometimes it seems that several companies will develop a concept simultaneously? Well, that is what happened in 2010, with the inclusion of collaboration into UC and the blending of UC and the contact center. We saw Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Siemens and others make announcement after announcement around this, and now Aspect as well.

Aspect Unified IP 7 also is focused on the blending of Consumer 2.0 which encompasses social media, with Enterprise 2.0, which encompasses UC/collaboration technologies, to facilitate a new type of customer contact model - rich, multi-channel customer contact. While this is also an industry trend, what Aspect brings to the party is dynamic contextual enterprise routing of calls between multiple locations, using Aspect SIP Session Manager and Unified Command and Control, so that a caller is connected to the best skilled resource no matter where they are located, creating a virtual queue across a network of Aspect Unified IP systems. As part of this, Aspect is also providing intelligent queue management so that callers can request a scheduled callback or reserve their position in queue, and callers that hang up can also be called back as well.

Capitalizing on their Microsoft relationship, Aspect also completely redesigned their agent desktop to enhance agent productivity. The unified agent desktop utilizes unified communications capabilities, such as presence, collaboration and IM through Microsoft Lync. This allows agents to do things such as find an expert outside the contact center to help them with search from Microsoft SharePoint 2010. The agent desktop supports complete workflow scripting that allows for preferred agent routing and multi-case handling. Aspect also improved their outbound campaign management and notifications so that customers can deliver consistent proactive contact across multiple channels including outbound SMS and email.

There was way more to the release than I could put in here. You can read about it on Aspect's site. I just wanted to say that it was chockfull of intelligently planned out features that brought UC, collaboration and social media functionality smoothly into the agents' work environment. I was also impressed that Aspect took the additional step of including their legacy contact centers into their intelligent routing schemes so that customers have more of a seamless evolution strategy that allows them to add on a new node if they want, but not lose functionality if they want to continue on with their existing older nodes. As such, Aspect Unified IP 7 allows for network routing between Aspect Unified IP and Aspect CallCenter ACD. Additionally, they now support integration with Cisco ICM and Genesys for networking routing.