August 2001

• NICE New Office In Denver
• SAGE Results Expects To Yield Sage Advice
• RADVISION Bolsters European Presence
• ACT Up And Running In Singapore
• Syntellect Cements Central European Site
• Paragon Expands Into The Caribbean
• COPC To Open Indian Office To Promote Service Excellence

SAGE Results Expects To Yield Sage Advice
SAGE Results, Inc., a professional and technical services firm focused on maximizing the end-to-end customer experience, recently debuted. The company will specialize in four primary practice areas of consulting for internal and external support centers and companies that utilize contact centers. These services include contact center assessments, improvements and certification; human services optimization; new product evaluations, implementation and integration; organizational consulting and program management. The company was founded by Kenneth Webb, R. William Sheehan and Wayne Watson. SAGE Results, Inc. intends to apply its expertise to providing professional services in enterprise strategy, process improvement, information technology, telecommunications, organizational change, strategic and project management, education, training and facilitation.

RADVISION Bolsters European Presence
RADVISION, Inc., a provider of industry-standard products and technology for real-time voice and video over IP, has opened a new sales office in London under the management of Jonathan Hassard, managing director. Hassard will be responsible for developing and expanding RADVISION's customer and partner relationships in the UK and throughout Europe. According to Gadi Tamari, CEO of RADVISION, "The European market represents an important growth opportunity for RADVISION. The new sales office in the UK will facilitate the development of new channels and partner relationships while strengthening our existing ones. The UK is also our largest market in Europe currently and the most advanced in terms of adoption of IP-communications."

ACT Up And Running In Singapore
ACT Teleconferencing, Inc., a provider of audio, video, data and Internet conferencing products and services, recently opened a new service delivery center and sales office in Singapore. With the new office, ACT added a fourth Asia Pacific operation to its worldwide conferencing platform of 13 cities in 10 countries. The Singapore office will offer a complete range of conferencing services to its clients. ACT Chairman Gerald D. Van Eeckhout said, "We expect explosive growth in the teleconferencing and multimedia communications sector in Southeast Asia over the next few years. With globalization, corporate travel cutbacks and the continuing growth within the Asian telecom market, we expect Singapore and the surrounding region to be a strong market for us." Singapore is one of the largest ports in the world, serving as the center of all trade for Southeast Asia and as the regional headquarters for many global Fortune 500 companies.

Syntellect Cements Central European Site
Syntellect Inc., a provider of open systems, enterprise voice portal software and hosted services, announced the opening of a Frankfurt-based office to serve German-speaking countries. The new office is part of Syntellect's worldwide expansion strategy consistent with the recent opening of offices for the Nordic and Benelux regions in Stockholm and Amsterdam, respectively. The Frankfurt office will support Syntellect activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. According to industry researchers, in the next four years Germany is expected to be the largest market in Western Europe for sales of contact center solutions.

Paragon Expands Into The Caribbean
Paragon Marketing Services, Inc., a Florida-based teleservices and contact management company, announced it formed an affiliate company, Paragon Marketing Services International, Ltd. (PMSI), to develop offshore contact center opportunities, primarily in the Caribbean basin. PMSI's first offshore contact center opened in July in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, West Indies. Trinidad is a major industrial and petroleum force in the Caribbean basin. Trinidad has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, at 98 percent. Paragon's president and CEO Anthony P. Solazzo said the "...contact center will offer clients the latest technology, including digital recording, in a fully predictive environment with state-of-the-art inbound contact management capabilities."

COPC To Open Indian Office To Promote Service Excellence
Customer Operations Performance Center Inc. (COPC), a performance management organization for the customer contact industry, announced plans to help drive the evolution of India's burgeoning customer contact industry and extend its activities to this rapidly growing area. COPC is working with industry organizations and customer-focused companies to ensure the success of the customer contact industry in the region. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, India's labor pool has low turnover rates of 6-10 percent and lower operating costs, making India a prime location for opening call centers. In contrast, U.S. turnover rates are 34 percent or greater and operating costs are 40-60 percent higher.

As COPC looks to extend its global presence, it will open an office in India to help drive adoption of its standard. The COPC-2000 Standard was developed by individuals from customer-focused companies who were concerned with the level of service quality provided to customers. The COPC-2000 Standard is a comprehensive operations performance standard that specifies minimum operational requirements in critical functional areas. More than 200 locations in 30 countries are using the Standard to improve performance. Users include firms in e-commerce, computer hardware and software, financial services, healthcare, telecommunications and consumer products.

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