Although its summer and not the high season for big announcements, there are still some gems that have crossed my inbox this week. Here are some highlights:

OrderCatcher, a provider of speech-enabled voice portals for the hospitality and restaurant markets has developed a really compelling voice application development tool that essentially takes the developer out of the equation. I’ve seen a lot of IVR application development tools over the years that I’ve tracked this market, but this one even looks simple in a presentation, and normally they don’t. iSAT (Instant Speech Application Technology) can take a script and turn it into an application with blinding speed. For example, iSAT uses a grammar engine that parses all menu items in a quick-service restaurant menu and generates slot-based grammars, for all possible ways that a customer might order. The engine then generates semantic scripts from the items, and options or modifiers of those items. The OrderCatcher applications are state-based, allowing flexible control of the call flow and a natural sounding application. The application takes into account all of the options a caller will use, and then only prompts for any information it hasn’t received yet.

That is a simplistic description of the tool, but it is simple. The compelling part of iSAT, however, is that it is part of a hosted solution from OrderCatcher that looks to be really attractive for the SMB market, in that a company can give a script to OrderCatcher and within hours, OrderCatcher will have a working application up and running with no development costs to the business. The only fees are for the minutes used by callers. That equates to instant ROI. Interested in hearing more?

Next up was Interactive Intelligence’s announcement of a partnership with Buzzient to incorporate social media into the contact center. Interactive Intelligence is going to use Buzzient’s social media analysis and integration capabilities to monitor social media “chatter” according to customer-defined keywords, and then route the pertinent content as email messages to the person or agent best suited to handle the content, based on business rules and agent skill set.

Buzzient will monitor myriad social media interactions from the normal suspects, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, but also blogs, wikis and other sources too. The interactions can be tagged with quantitative sentiment scores for tone, such as negative or positive comments. The emails will be routed as part of Interactive’s multi-channel queuing and routing solution, based on the tone or other factors such as a vertical market focus, product name, competitors name, etc.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a developmental addendum to a product called ZoomSafer, which I blogged about on the UCStrategies site in March. A brief description, but you can see more here, is ZoomSafer is a patented solution that provides flexible policy management for the use of mobile devices while driving. It consists of a web application that allows a business or individual to customize their own set of safe driving policies, and track and administer them, a client application to download onto a users’ mobile device to enforce the policies, and a set of free voice services to allow users to text, call or email, hands-free while driving. It uses the customer’s GPS to automatically detect the customer’s speed and if they are driving or not.

After great customer feedback since the company launched the product, this next iteration provides further automation, and integration with Bluetooth technology to automatically determine when the customer is driving, but with zero incremental drain on the customer’s mobile phone battery. ZoomSafer claims that this is the world’s first safe driving software to integrate with in-vehicle Bluetooth technologies to automatically activate/deactivate “safe drive mode” on a user’s smartphone whenever they power on/off their in-vehicle Bluetooth device. In this release the Bluetooth Beta software works on Blackberry smartphones running 4.2.1 OS and higher. Later additions will include availability on Windows Mobile and Android phones as well.

When talking to vendors about competition in contact centers the two names that most often pop up for North America are Cisco and Avaya, followed by Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, and then myriad others. What do Cisco’s competitors say are magic bullets in competing with Cisco? They say that Cisco is too expensive, not fully-featured, complex, and solutions require too many servers. Those bullets are losing speed, since Cisco, in addition to continuing to develop and rollout some rather visionary contact center and collaboration goodies, is working on filling long overdue feature holes in the more traditional contact center products, and reducing the amount of servers required to run it all.

I was happy to participate this week in a contact center day that Cisco held in Boston. We hadn’t had a deep dive into contact center for awhile, in part because of the effort it has taken Cisco to bring to market and educate analysts on their unified communications and collaboration portfolio enhancements. Contact center is part of UC at Cisco, but in last year’s big fall announcement of new UC and collaboration products, traditional contact center products tended to take a back seat; but not now. No, this isn’t a renewed focus on contact center, as the focus has been there all along, we just havent’ heard much about it lately. But in the last year Cisco has added 80+ people to their contact center teams, and are shooting to be number one in contact center; hoping to boot out Avaya, a vision John Hernandez, VP and general manager of Cisco’s contact center business unit, made clear in his opening presentation.

However, getting back to my earlier comment on competitive silver bullets – in order to facilitate adding new capabilities and fixing feature holes in the product line, Cisco made some big changes to both process and organization. The company moved from a waterfall development process to an Agile one so that they can very quickly add new developments or fix issues within products, in weeks, not months or years. They have a board focused solely on customer interaction, and they make use of what other development teams are doing, taking developments within, for example, UC and applying them to the contact center, so they take advantage of existing resources. For example, Cisco is taking the competency collection capabilities of Cisco Pulse, and applying it to skills-based routing functionality in contact centers.

What this has allowed Cisco to do is to focus the bulk of their R&D on the core or legacy contact center portfolio. Cisco still has 70% of its R&D focused on the core platform and applications, and have been avidly working on improving some of the weaker areas of their product lines.

However, the day wasn’t all core product enhancements. Of course, during the event we also heard more on some of more intriguing product additions being made to the portfolio. For example, in November we were introduced to Cisco Pulse, which watches everything going across the network and tags pertinent content building a dynamic picture of knowledge competencies across an organization. Within a contact center, Cisco’s vision is to use Pulse to embellish or replace skills-based routing.

We also heard a lot about how Cisco intends to integrate social media into the contact center as well. For example, Cisco is building a solution to add social media to customer care agents. Cisco is already openly talking about this for launch later this year. Basically, it is an appliance that taps into the social web, captures consumer-generated content, analyzes it, prioritizes it, and then distributes it through workflow. More details to come as they get to announcement.

In all, the new things Cisco is working on seem very compelling, and much more clear than when we sat through the big launch in November. For example, seven months ago Pulse was a concept. Now it is available, and fairly soon we will get to hear about how contact centers are using it. I’m looking forward to it.

Last week, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN) announced the availability of the company’s latest release of OpenScape Voice – Version 4.0. For those not familiar with OpenScape Voice, it is Siemens communications platform that is the core of their PBX, UC, UM and Contact Center offerings. As part of OpenScape UC Server, it provides enterprise grade voice services, carrier grade scalability and reliability, IP least-cost routing, video conferencing, mobility, unified messaging and role-based UC applications. Based on a native IP-based software platform (SIP), OpenScape Voice utilizes SEN Group’s unified OpenSOA applications framework.

In this release, Siemens improved the platform including adding forty new features. For example, they introduced a new team working and executive assistant application, which helps to streamline the management of executive calls with support of one or more assistants, and provides multiple call handling options for voicemail and mobility. This V4 release also includes two new capabilities – OpenScape Branch and OpenScape Concierge.

OpenScape Branch is just what it sounds like; a voice solution for customers with multiple branch offices that want the functionality of larger enterprises across their branch offices. It is scalable in 50, 250, 1000, and 6000 user variants. It’s a single box solution with an integrated gateway and analog adapter for smaller remote branches. It also has integrated management with OpenScape Voice. OpenScape branch includes a SIP Proxy for survivability, and a Session Border Controller (SBC) for local SIP trunking connections. It also provides streamlined management through a common portal for simple installation and integration.

According to Siemens, OpenScape Concierge is the industry’s first true unified communications (UC) Attendant Console application. OpenScape Concierge provides telephone attendants (such as switchboard operators) with the same UC desktop functions that other UC users have, including real-time UC-based presence status information for contacts across both OpenScape Voice and HiPath 4000 systems. It provides the user with detailed data on incoming customer calls, and also supports call queue and corporate directory integration, so that telephone attendants can more easily direct incoming calls to anyone in the organization.

With OpenScape Voice Siemens has delivered on the trends that we have been seeing in the industry in the past 5 years. Besides being software based, making it simple to manage, install and upgrade, OpenScape was designed to be green. Siemens maintains that OpenScape provides the lowest carbon footprint and lowest power-cost per user in the industry. They also maintain that it provides the lowest TCO and best ROI as well. I’m not in the position to comment as to whether or not this is true – just reporting on intent. Siemens is also positioning OpenScape Voice along the lines of some recent trends – “cloud and social-media ready”. The later we saw demonstrated at VoiceCon in the fall with Twitter integration.

In all I like the consistency of what I am seeing with Siemens. Eighteen months ago we saw the emergence of the change from proprietary hardware and software to open, standards-based software and services, moving away from the TDM-based HiCom and VoIP-based HiPath platforms, and each announcement after that has built on those principals, along with delivering industry par or leading applications and functionality as well.

This week at VoiceCon in San Francisco, among the usual chatter about “What do you think of the show”, were comments about the need to modify some of the usual presentations that we have on comparing vendor offerings in unified communications, and where the industry is in unified communications. The vendors I talked to commonly voiced that for the most part, comparing the features of unified communications is a moot point, because almost every player has all the basics by now. That is pretty much what I saw too. The show was smaller, and there weren’t any tremendous new announcements this year.

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It occurred to me this morning that I just started my third year of blogging. Not that you would know it from my home page, as somewhere back in December I lost the ability to put the latest blog teaser on my home page. For a month or two I asked my web guys to manually put it on there and fix it, but it never got fixed. I gave up asking them as they are busy and I’ve blogged probably 20 times since then, but it makes my site look old if you stumble on it. The “fix” doesn’t seem to be to fix the user interface, separate from my blogging software that enabled me to put that first paragraph on my home page, but instead seems to be to invest in the latest release of blogging software. I’ve never been a big fan of having application functionality and then having it taken away unless you pay. But I guess that is how the world works.

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I was becoming a big fan of Twitter; incorporating into my daily work life, tweeting about events and following a lot of other people’s tweets, and even recommending to clients that they use it, until two weeks ago when I tweeted about having taken Mandarin when I was younger, but feeling glad that I didn’t have to live in China. That was during the time that China blocked Twitter in response to Twitter users talking about the anniversary of Tian An Men Square. I know this is a coincidence, but that was it. After that tweet, Twitter no longer would accept any of my updates.

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