An agreement has been reached between Telstra Incorporated, the US subsidiary of Australian-based tier one global carrier, Telstra Corporation Limited, and Five9, Inc., a provider of on-demand telemarketing, customer service and call center solutions for customer interaction management. Under the agreement, Telstra Incorporated will license, distribute, resell and support the Five9 Virtual Call Center worldwide.


Virtual Call Center products from Five9 are designed to enable companies of any size to build a comprehensive, feature-rich call center anywhere in the world by leveraging a hosted model that can provide cost-savings while eliminating the need to purchase premise-based equipment. Telstra’s global multinational customers can especially benefit from this capability as they will now be able to quickly build and change the size of their contact centers when business needs dictate.

Virtual Call Center enables any business with just a PC and a broadband connection to deploy a comprehensive suite of capabilities such as call blending and prioritization, predictive dialing, automatic call distribution, customer relationship management (CRM), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony (CTI), remote agent capabilities, skills-based routing, call recording, compliance, silent monitoring, real-time reporting and centralized management.

“Hosted applications are the type of value added services that create a tremendous differentiator for us in a highly competitive market place,” said Andrew Morawski, president of Telstra Incorporated, in a statement on Wednesday. “Our infrastructure and international experience combined with the Five9 platform are a great balance during this growth period of the call center market space. Add this to our core voice and data offerings, which are already being used by many leading US multinational companies, and we have an ever widening portfolio of high value services.”

According to Brain Silverman, president and CEO of Five9, the new relationship with Telstra Incorporated is very exciting for Five9. Telstra Incorporated brings an extensive global reach to Five9 that will greatly benefit customers worldwide by enabling Five9 to offer the lowest rates and highest quality available for long distance.

Silverman added that his team at Five9 believes that this joint go-to-market agreement validates the emergence of the on-demand model in the call center industry and beyond the US to other markets around the world.

This agreement provides great benefits for all involved. Five9 has done well to build its reputation on offering enterprise-class call center functionality to the SMB market. With this agreement with Telstra Incorporated, more organizations will have access to the Virtual Call Center to facilitate call center operations without significant capital investments.

Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly looking to VoIP to help save on telecommunications expenses as well as gain access to a wealth of new and exciting applications that are designed to help them grow their business and help their employees become more productive. If you’re still waiting to learn about the benefits of VoIP for the SMB, don’t delay. Come to INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO EAST, January 23–26, 2007 to learn all your need to know to take advantage of the latest in telecommunications. See you in sunny Ft. Lauderdale!

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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.