Gary Barnett, President and Chief Executive Officer, played a key role as a founding engineer at Aspect in the development of the company’s first automatic call distributor (ACD), which transformed customer service and the telecommunications industry. He is recognized globally as an expert in all areas of contact center technologies, including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), multichannel contact routing, workforce management, computer-telephony integration, and self-service technologies.

Mr. Barnett leads Aspect's executive team and oversees all business operations worldwide. Most recently as Aspect’s executive vice president of products and chief technology officer, Mr. Barnett provided the vision and set policy for the technological foundation of all Aspect products and served as Aspect’s key technology spokesperson.

Mr. Barnett has a distinguished history as a driving force in communications technology. He was a founding engineer at Octel Communications, where he was one of the developers of Octel’s first voice-messaging system. At Octel, Mr. Barnett did early groundbreaking work in the field of unified messaging. He left Octel to become a founding engineer at Aspect, where he was a leader in Aspect’s successful effort to develop the first ACD software to run on standard hardware systems. In 1987,

Mr. Barnett became a founder of Prospect Software, a company that pioneered computer-telephony integration in the early 1990s. He returned to Aspect in 1996 when the company acquired Prospect Software. Mr. Barnett holds a bachelor's degree from Western Kentucky University and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky.