Cisco and Oracle on Tuesday announced a joint development and marketing arrangement to enable customers to implement and operate IP-based virtual customer service centers.
The companies are developing call center products that combine Oracle's customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning applications with Cisco's call routing and computer/telephony integration (CTI) software. The first product from this collaboration is expected before the end of this year.
The companies are addressing a market that is potentially the size of the several markets combined, including CRM and CTI. The call center application market alone is $13 billion, the companies say; the total addressable market for Cisco and Oracle is that, plus a percentage of that amount, they say.
Cisco and Oracle are attempting to develop and market products that will gradually supplant today's call center environments, which are cobbled together with disparate automated call distributors (ACDs), PBXs, interactive voice response units (IVRs), Web collaboration products, e-mail packages, and sales, service, marketing and e-commerce applications from several vendors. Moreover, these systems are today based on proprietary networking technology, including legacy telephony systems, whereas Cisco and Oracle are developing call center systems around the ubiquitous IP protocol. IP could potentially make these systems more adaptable and less costly to deploy and maintain, they say.
"The call center is one of the last bastions of strength for the Old World," says Eugene Lee, vice president of marketing for Cisco's Internet communications software group, referring to telephony stalwarts Lucent and Nortel, and to corporate telecom staffs. "The (data) network and phone guys really collide the hardest at the call center. We now have the killer applications that will drag (voice/data) convergence into the call center so the balance of power will shift back to the data center."
Additionally, Cisco and Oracle say customers need only barter with two vendors for their IP call center needs, instead of as many as 12. As a result, the number of IP-enabled call centers will increase fivefold between 1998 and 2003, they say.
Under the arrangement, the companies will integrate Oracle's E-Business Suite 11i software and Cisco's Intelligent Contact Manager and Customer Interaction Suite software. This software performs site and network-based queuing, routing, media blending, ACD and IVR integration for Internet telephony, as well as Web interaction for collaborative and chat sessions.
The joint offering is expected to provide capabilities for managing various customer interaction methods, including phone, e-mail, Web collaboration, Web chat, IVR and voice-over-IP.
"Every call center is going to have to become a multimedia customer contact center," says Cisco's Lee.
The companies plan to deliver products in phases. The companies are currently in trials with the first phase, which is CTI integration with Cisco's ICM software and Oracle's CRM applications.
Phase 2, slated for the first half of 2001, will be an single integrated customer interaction system from the companies. Phase 3, also scheduled for 2001, will be a single, integrated system packaged for hosted environments, such as those operated by application service providers.
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