Spanlink: Contact Center Player Moves To IP Telephony

BY RICH TEHRANI

Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of short articles from Rich Tehrani based on recent visits with a number of VoIP vendors. The previous article is available here.

The rush into VoIP is being embraced from just about every company that can try to lay claim to a piece of this market. Perhaps most surprising is the electric utility companies that are looking to become tomorrow�s VoIP service providers.

In the contact center space, too, every company wants a piece of the pie. Case in point is Spanlink, a player in the contact center market for many years. They have recently moved into IP telephony and have further partnered with Cisco and have tailored applications to take full advantage of VoIP in the contact center. There is a broad range of products in their portfolio:

• Concentric Customer: Provides natural language apps for the Web and IVR

• Concentric Agent: Monitors agents, manages workflow and CTI integration

•  Concentric Supervisor: Real-time reports, coaching and monitoring solutions

•  Concentric Telephony: IP phone and open interfaces such as XML and JTAPI

One of the recent pushes has been to sell solutions based on multi-tenancy, which can be used in a hosted solution if you are an ASP for example.

The state of Minnesota is using the multi-tenancy features of Spanlink�s solution to provide hosted solutions across state agencies that are managed by a single agency. As opposed to having to deal with disparate vendors and solutions, it was found to be more cost effective to go this internal ASP route.

The hosted communications market had a false start back in 2001, but the technology is so solid now and there are so many companies deploying solutions that it is worth considering this type of model in any IP contact center deployment.

Please talk back to me in our forums.

Rich Tehrani is TMC's president. He welcomes your comments. Participate in our forums.