One of the trends I am seeing more and more of is hosting—whether from the likes of Covad and Packet8 on the VoIP side or Contactual and Five9 on the call center side. Hosted CRM, too, is making big waves this year with Salesforce.com doing well and Oracle’s (News - Alert) Siebel division pushing for hosting dominance.


A while back I had a chance to spend an afternoon with Catherine van Evans, Marcom Manager, and John Joseph, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Envox, regarding their company’s new hosting initiative with VoltDelta. Envox is supplying the IVR functionality while VoltDelta contributes expertise to provide the robust and redundant back-end solutions.

I have always thought of Envox as a superior telephony building block company. It provides products like voice self-service, unified communications (voicemail, auto-attendants) and a slew of other sophisticated applications. The company also provides contact center solutions such as CTI and skills based routing.

So, when Envox had an opportunity to partner with VoltDelta a leader in automated directory assistance solutions, the match seemed perfect. Envox brings the tools and software and VoltDelta brings the backend capable of scaling to meet the needs of call centers of virtually any size.

The service is called Envox OnDemand. It allows customers to communicate via fax, voice, e-mail, SMS, TDM or VoIP all from the single platform. In addition, the partnership yields a team of 50+ professionals who can help customers with design and deployment of applications. Another unique differentiator is the agent backup solution allowing your caller to get live support if needed.

 

Many of my readers know I have recently become a huge fan of hosting, and I see this entry into the call center hosting market as appositive step forward for both Envox and VoltDelta. In the end having another player in the hosted space is great for customers. Companies that trust the Envox toolset now have access to a robust and scalable hosted backend—enabling telephony applications to be as scaleable as necessary.

The world of call centers is evolving quickly. To stay ahead of this trend be sure to attend Call Center 2.0, collocated with Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in San Diego, CA this week.