NetworkWorld posted an article recently on the VoIP rollout for the household name Stanley Tools. Rather than going, as the article alludes to, with a Cisco IP Telephony infrastructure, they went with Interactive Intelligence’s CIC system:
The core of the project starts with Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center (CIC), a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based automated call distributor platform with call center features.
I would argue that the CIC is fundamentally different from Cisco’s Call Manager in that CIC is an application services platform with a SIP PBX beneath. This is what I have been calling this week an Application Services platform. Where it is fundamentally different from an IP PBX is that it is designed from the Application Services layer down rather than the PBX system up. As the name suggests, Customer Interaction Center, the software is designed to facilitate the interactions that an IP Communications system provides and the workflow and processes enabling these are up front rather than a separate discrete. Another example of an Application Services Platform is the Cistera Convergence Server. Their Event Alerting and Notification Systems (ENA) and QA systems are designed to facilitate the workflow and processes behind a comprehensive EAN solution and specifically takes that view when implementing an IP communications solution. The difference between IP Communications and IP Telephony is in the application services.
