By David Greenfield, Executive Editor, Network Magazine

license this article --

-- It's got email, Web access, Instant Messaging (IM), and fries your eggs to boot. Converged contact-center vendors make some pretty tall claims and pack in a ream of functionality these days, but how's a network technology manager to sift through the product details and demos to find solutions that make an impact?

Simple. Issue a Request For Information (RFI), which is just what Communications Convergence and CommWeb did. A real, but anonymous healthcare-related company in the US (see conclusion of this article for more on "Who's Buying") was shopping around for a new VoIP solution for its Meridian 81C and called in yours truly to help with the analysis and planning.

The requirements were intriguing and realistic. A planned migration from an existing PBX, let alone a Meridian, was about as real world as you're going to find. The agent set was low, 150 users on one site, but plans to grow to 400 users would complicate vendor response.

Vendors pitching their low-end contact-center solutions at a great price would face the risk of not being able to deliver enough functionality as the site grows.

At the same time, high-end solutions would be over-kill.

Vendors would have to find a way to thread the sort of needle that many managers will be presenting them. And of course the user was fascinating because its IT manager had the vision to embrace a converged contact center with all of the trimmings.

After hours of interviewing and analyzing their requirements, we developed an RFI that reflected their needs. We issued that RFI to 10 vendors, all but Cisco and EADS Telecom replied. We even considered an outsourced solution (see The Outsourced Play). We then took those results and, within insight from telecom managers in the field, analyzed those bids up, down and center.

Process & Picks

We concluded, finally, that Xyz should look at a two-step process.

Step one, cleave the underlying VoIP network from the call-center application. The Meridian remains a highly reliable switch and we couldn't think of an overriding reason to forklift upgrade the environment to VoIP. Still, we do see a need to account for a complete IP Telephony transition at a later date, and whatever solution was selected would need to consider that strategy.

The second step was to evaluate the speeds and feeds of the call-center environments. Each of the companies evaluated delivered excellent solutions depending on the customer requirements. Xyz's IT manager in particular wanted: to minimize his migration time; demanded multisite support; preferred a solution integrating voicemail email, IM and voice; and initially wanted to provide at least 99.99 percent uptime, but after additional consideration preferred 99.999 percent uptime.

Against those requirements we saw definite differences amongst our proposed solutions.

All vendors claimed to offer multimedia messaging against common queues that worked across multiple sites, though not all provided every agent with that capability. Some solutions required additional investment to reach multi-site support or higher system fault-tolerance. Other solutions sacrificed on functionality to deliver a rounder mix of functions.

After a close analysis of the various bids and offers, it was felt that Telephony@Works most closely matched this particular user's requirements, followed by Avaya and Interactive Intelligence (I3).

Telephony@Works' distributed architecture gives it the multisite capability and resilience built in. The company also delivered tight integration of voice, email and IM, which is what this particular customer required. Telephony@Works also integrates nicely with the 81C.

And then there's the price tag. Telephony@Work was 20% less expensive than Nortel's bid. That didn't make the Telephony@Work the least expensive solution, Avaya took that distinction followed by Rockwell and Interactive Intelligence; yet it did give Telephony@Work a top-notch blend of functionality and price.

No solution is without its limitation and Telephony@Work's CallCenter@nywhere (CC@) has its share of open questions. Perhaps most significantly is business process.

Siemens, Nortel, and Avaya all demonstrate a clear sense of packaging, hand-holding and service delivery. There's a level of assurance with going with a brand that's well established and known. Those benefits should not be discounted. It wasn't clear whether Telephony@Works delivered the same level of service.

Functionally, Telephony@Works reporting is adequate, but ultimately may limit the customer. An open interface lets statistics and information be exported to outside report generators. The software predictive dialer and IVR capabilities may show signs of limitations in larger environments, but met our customer's requirements nicely.

Single Sourced Systems

Despite the Xyz manager's initial reaction and desire to move off of the 81C, they wanted to consider Nortel's call center solution along with the solutions from other traditional PBX suppliers, namely Avaya and Siemens. Beyond any technology benefit, probably the biggest asset in going with these vendors is the assurance of dealing with a major vendor with experience and resources to execute on a major call-center deployment.

The Nortel bid called for an upgrade to the 81C to Succession 3.0, turning the switch into an IP converged platform. All of the additional applications - the call center software (Symposium), the IVR and ACD software (Symposium Call Center Server Software and MPS100, respectively), the unified messaging system (CallPilot), and the telephony manager (Optivity) were to run off of servers provided by Xyz.

Nortel included a mix of soft and hard clients in the bid. Fifty i2004 IP Sets and 50 i2050 softphones with USB headsets were included. Sixteen remote office agents were also included.

On a pure functionality level, the Nortel bid scored high, offering Symposium as a blended contact center with support for voice, Web chats, and e-mail. IM and presence are integrated together. Symposium offers the necessary self-service functions that Xyz required, including faxback (fax server was not included), IVR and call-routing functions. Skills-based routing and ACD sophistication met the customer requirements.

Reliability and remote access were also strong points. The Succession leverages 81C's redundancy -- which very much pleased our panel. System reuse is high and offered Xyz a clean migration to the VoIP as necessary.

Remote access, provided by the IRemote 9115, is more expensive than other solutions, but delivers the necessary hardware to switch to alternative lines in the event IP quality of service drops below acceptable levels.

The question, however, with the Nortel bid was complexity and in turn pricing. Succession uses a centralized architecture around a single server and database per site mode, complicating configuration of multiple Succession servers against a common database. Adding multisite capability is possible, but requires an additional software (the Nortel Network Controller) of another $28,000 list price, with actual price probably closer to $20,000.

Deployment times are said to be quite high as well. Nortel argues that with Symposium Express deployment can go in "two weeks," but the vendor did not pitch the Symposium Express, which is bounded to 150 active agents and offers limited messaging capabilities. Xyz's requirement to scale to 400 sites forced Nortel to bid the Symposium Call Center Server, which even Nortel's conservative estimates put deployment at 30 to 60 days. A far cry from user projected deployment of nine months.

Part of the problem is that, although Succession offers a common marketing brand, it's actually composed of several different products, making the integration that much more difficult. Furthermore, external voice-recording servers connect to the Meridian through external tie lines, which, if not engineered properly, may result in blocked calls to the server.

The natural alternatives to Nortel were the two other legacy PBX vendors, Siemens and Avaya.

Siemens proposed connecting it HiPath Procenter to the the Nortel 81C through the HiPath IPortal, which provides VoIP support for call-center agents and supervisors and a gateway to existing Nortel systems.

The call center would be driven by the HiPath ProCenter V5.1 Advance application, which provides integrated, multimedia, skills-based call routing and management (including web chat and outbound/callback functionality). Unified messaging was delivered by the HiPath Xpressions V3 Standard application into a Notes mailbox. The HiPath ComResponse web-based voice application platform, provided DTMF auto attendant and basic IVR functionality. Call Recording was provided by Verint Ultra Express. Agents were equipped with optiPoint 410 phones and HiPath ProCenter Agent Desktop

The Siemens bid came in the second highest of the group and for good reason. The company was one of the few to include call-recording within the bid. Remove this and Siemens would have been in the middle of the pack on pricing.

On the other hand, Siemens did not include presence and IM, functions of its OpenScape product, in the bid price. OpenScape was available, but for $400 per seat. Even then Xyz would have required deployment of the Microsoft platform -- Windows Server 2003, Live Communications Server and Windows Messenger. Siemens is working on a Notes version of the software.

Agent licenses was another open question for Siemens. The company provided 100 agent licenses for voice, but just 10 licenses for email and web. Whether those licenses would prove a limitation and require additional access was not ascertained.

Avaya was the only vendor to propose two solutions -- a tactical one and a strategic one. Both solutions require Avaya's voice response system, Avaya Interactive Response (IR), and Avaya's Contact Center software, Avaya Interaction Center (IC) with Avaya Operational Analyst.
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