Altitude Software (News - Alert), a global contact center solutions vendor, announced the availability of Altitude vBox 4 FP11, a full-featured Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) software solution that enables more cost savings in contact centers.

The new vBox is optimized to deploy “powerful, state-of-the art multimedia IP contact center solutions on a short time-frame with the lowest total cost of ownership,” company officials said.

Altitude vBox is an open-standards based solution, which runs on OS Linux and turns any regular computer into a feature-rich unified communications server. When combined with Altitude uCI interaction management solution suite, Altitude vBox helps organizations implement a state-of-the art IP contact center rapidly and with a very low total cost of ownership.

"In the last three years, Altitude vBox has won customers and market recognition as free, comprehensive and reliable SIP server software for contact centers" said Miguel Lopes, Marketing vice president at Altitude Software, in a statement. "The features now introduced innovate in supporting channels like Skype (News - Alert), providing further communications cost reductions and enhancing reliability.”Altitude vBox now enables customers to make free calls and easy click-to-call convenience for customers using Skype into the contact center. The new customer service functionalities improve first call resolution.

The solution provides increased system availability with support for fallback DNS server, application server failover clustering and transit switch architecture. It also features enhanced agent ergonomics as well as simpler administration with support for auto provisioning.

With Altitude uCI and Altitude vBox, contact centers can have a smooth transition to VoIP. The new VoIP service can be up and running in hours, thanks to the fast hardware procurement and the pre-integration between Altitude vBox and the Altitude uCI suite.

The open architecture of the Altitude solutions also integrates with existing contact center solutions and preserves investments in traditional systems, while providing a platform for future applications, company officials said.

The highly scalable Altitude vBox installations can start with just a few users and grow to large organization's specific needs. Users can add features and functionalities as needed. Agents can continue using hard phones or start using Altitude Unified Desktop that includes an integrated SIP soft-phone. They also have the option to integrate any custom desktop application or a third party CRM application, in order to provide data capabilities and multimedia interaction handling.In June, Altitude Software announced a partnership with Umanis, a management and information technology consulting services provider, to deliver the Altitude uCI Hosted Multimedia Contact Center Solution in France.