Unifie messaging and IP telephony takes center stage at expo

Los Angeles

A bevy of new products in the emerging markets of Web call center integration, unified messaging and IP telephony will be on display this week at the Computer Telephony Expo here.

One major announcement is expected to come from call center vendor Aspect Telecommunications, Inc., which plans to debut its new Web Agent software for corporate Web servers.

The Aspect software will en-able a company to place a "call me" help button on its corporate Web site. When a customer clicks on the button, the server will download a Java applet. The applet first probes the customer's PC to see if IP collaboration packages such as CoolTalk or NetMeeting are present, said Dilip Venkatachari, Aspect's director of electronic commerce solutions. If one of those packages is loaded on the customer's PC, a dialog box appears, asking the customer if he wants to use the collaboration software.

If not, the applet prompts the customer to make available a second telephone line and a phone number. The call center's automatic call distributor then establishes a phone link between the customer and an agent. The customer also can choose whether to have a live conversation with the agent or use text chat, Venkatachari said.

Mutual fund company Strong Capital Management, Inc., in Menominee Falls, Wis., is testing Web Agent for its 200-seat call center. Strong chose Web Agent over other recently introduced Internet call center products because it offers different ways for customers and call center agents to collaborate, depending on their desktop configurations, said Peter Schwab, Strong's director of share-holder communications.

Web Agent replaces an earlier, more limited Internet call center integration effort from Aspect called Interactive Web (NW, Aug. 12, 1996, page 17).

Really unified

Helping the push toward unified messaging will be new alliances between Lucent Technologies, Inc., Microsoft Corp. and a host of fax software vendors. The companies will announce that users of Lucent's Octel Unified Messenger, a system for providing voice mail headers and playback capabilities in Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, can install fax server software from four different vendors to add fax messages to the Exchange client interface.

Octel Unified Messenger began shipping several months ago. "But the first version only had voice mail, so users asked what's so unified about it?" said Joseph Avellino, president of Lucent partner Optus Software, Inc., in Somerset, N.J.

In the IP telephony arena, Dallas-based Selsius Systems, Inc. will demonstrate Version 2.0 of its Selsius-IP PBX at the expo. Selsius-IP is a call processing system that transports intraoffice voice over Ethernet and wide-area voice over the public telephone network or a managed IP network, all with traditional phoneset end points (NW, Sept. 22, 1997, page 29). The new version adds call waiting and interfaces to support external voice mail and interactive voice response systems, plus IP addressing for the phones.

Aspect: (408) 325-2200; Lucent: (800) 444-5590; Selsius: (972) 855-8200