VoiceNation's OpenAnswer Earns ITEXPO 'Best of Show' Award

The 2016 ITEXPO held in January in Florida had 129 exhibitors and thousands of attendees. This included speakers from some of the biggest names in IT, 120 sessions and five colocated events. As in most expos, awards are given for exhibitors and participants that stood out, and this year, VoiceNation, was recognized with the "Best of Show" award at the annual expo for its open source answering service software, OpenAnswer.

VoiceNation is a privately held virtual PBX, voicemail, and live answering service provider. The company offers enterprise grade solution small businesses can afford, however it also serves some of the largest brands in the world, including Comedy Central, Delta, Dunkin' Donuts, Rolls Royce, StateFarm and more than 50,000 others.

OpenAnswer was recognized as "Best of Show" because of the innovative aspects of this open source answering service. The product was launched in June of 2015 to give the call center industry a collaborative solution made freely available to the public. 

"We are thrilled to receive the Best of Show award for our OpenAnswer exhibit. Our service offering is one of the most unique, with features that truly stand out and we believe that is what really captured the judges' attention. OpenAnswer can literally save a small Telephone Answering Service (TAS) owner thousands upon thousands of dollars. You can't argue the value or innovative nature of something like that," said Eric Schurke, Director of Operations at VoiceNation.

The software eliminates the need to enter binding contracts as well as having to pay per seat when contact services are required. This will mean not having to pay thousands of dollars to deploy agent station and being constrained with propriety software that leaves very little room for flexibility.

OpenAnswer has unlimited seats, no licensing fees and center operators can share code changes easily in the company's OpenAnswer community. So if anyone creates an application that proves to be useful, it can easily be integrated to deliver the same options to everyone else.

The OpenAnswer operator screen is a browser-based platform with many of the features of large call centers. It has a built-in reporting feature, along with real-time call and que monitoring, quick account setup and a free support community. According to the company, all OpenAnswer needs is a properly configured Asterisk server and a modern browser for the agent station.