[April 28, 2005]

IBM Brings WebSphere to Cisco's Customer Voice Portal

BY ROBERT LIU

When Laurent Philonenko left Genesys Telecommunications Labs last June and later re-emerged at Cisco Systems, IBM's call center guru Bruce Morse saw it as an opportunity to open the networking giant's eyes to the role that speech technologies can play in the call center arena.

While the circumstances surrounding his departure remain uncertain, one thing was clear.Philonenko's arrival as Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Contact Center Business Unit meant that he brought with him a solid understanding of how Cisco could incorporate IBM's platforms and technologies to expand its role in the call center industry.

"Laurent brings a different perspective to Cisco," Morse, Vice President of Contact Center Solutions within IBM's Software division, told TMCnet during a recent telephone briefing.

As Genesys CTO, Philonenko struck an alliance with IBM to deliver vertical market-specific contact center and CRM solutions.And with him now at Cisco, Morse found an ally that would help expand the existing ties that IBM Global Services had with Cisco.

As a result, IBM today is announcing it has partnered with Cisco to deliver speech-enabled self-service solutions to contact centers using IBM's WebSphere Voice Server and Cisco's Customer Voice Portal. Global availability of the joint Cisco and IBM solutions is planned for the second quarter of 2005.

IBM is primarily targeting contact centers in banking, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, energy & utilities, retail, travel & transportation and consumer packaged goods. The solutions will initially support US, UK and Australian English; Chinese; Japanese; German; Spanish and Canadian French.

"The close integration of these technologies helps companies incorporate speech into today's enterprises, ensuring the highest quality of service is delivered from any global location," Philonenko said in his prepared statement.

But by adopting the WebSphere middleware platform, Cisco is also shutting the door on some of its customers that rely on an all-Microsoft environment. That's because IBM's application server relies on XML data to be parsed out in the VoiceXML standard while Microsoft uses Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) as a standard.

For example, Cisco has a partnership with Microsoft to enable its IP Communications Connector to support small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using Microsoft Business Solutions CRM.But if any of them wanted to incorporate speech-enabled self-service solutions onto those CRM systems, those customers would be hard pressed. Morse said IBM currently has no connector modules that would enable cross-platform interoperability with WebSphere Voice Server.

To be sure, most IVR vendors have endorsed the VoiceXML standard, Morse said. And with this partnership, Cisco Customer Voice Portal will incorporate not only VoiceXML but also the open standard of Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP), which facilitates integration of speech recognition and text-to-speech.

Cisco also will support IBM's Reusable Dialog Components (RDC) initiative. RDCs are an open source, Java-based set of pre-built components that aid in the rapid development of speech applications.By offering software components using standards and programming models that Java developers are familiar with, the initiative has opened up speech development to millions of Java programmers, and speeded integration of Web and voice applications into the mainstream business infrastructure, the companies said. IBM contributed RDCs to the Apache Software Foundation last year.

Cisco Systems is a diamond sponsor of the Speech-World Conference and Expo, taking place on May 24-26, 2005, in Dallas.Speech-World and TMCnet are both owned by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC).

Robert Liu is executive editor at TMCnet.  Previously, he was executive editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg.  He can be reached at [email protected].