Aspect to Deliver Small- to Mid-Size Turnkey Contact Center Product Built for Microsoft Lync

CHELMSFORD, Mass. — Aspect, a global provider of unified communications and collaboration services and software, today announced it will be delivering a software-based product for small- to mid-size contact center applications using Microsoft Lync as its media server. The new product will be a value-priced, turnkey option for IT Help Desks, virtual sales teams, corporate departments, branch offices and small- to mid-size contact centers looking to leverage their unified communications strategies. The product will include core contact center capabilities, as well as key unified communication functionality, including delivering voice over IP.

“This announcement reinforces the value the Aspect/Microsoft relationship, in place since March 2008, brings to existing and potential Lync users,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “The Aspect product will not ‘work’ or ‘integrate’ with Lync, but actually uses Lync as its media server.  It also offers SMB customers a product built on Aspect’s long-standing expertise in the contact center space.”

The product, scheduled to be delivered in Q1 2011, will support from 20 to 100 agents and supervisors. Among the contact center capabilities it will provide include voice, inbound voice and email routing, instant messaging (IM), real-time and historical reporting, a unified agent desktop, manual dialing and voice self service capabilities on a single server. The product will also include out-of-the-box workflows. Lync will deliver the media server and PBX functionality. The solution can be installed by Microsoft-savvy IT professionals, with minimal remote support from Aspect® Professional Services.

“We believe there are significant opportunities to bring contact center functionality to deliver key business benefits. Aspect is helping to address this target market by bringing its expertise with both contact center and unified communication capabilities to bear,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Lync and Speech Group at Microsoft Corp. “Our customers have been asking for an easy to implement and manage solution for smaller contact centers and help desks that will enable them to use the same telephony infrastructure that is being used in the enterprise.”

“We believe this product will deliver significant benefits to organizations by providing proven technology that is derived from Aspect’s best-of-breed solutions and years of customer contact leadership, delivered as a turnkey offering,” said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer at Aspect. “The product will provide an optimal blend of unified communications capabilities and key contact center features for low cost, in a small footprint. Importantly, it provides a natural first step for integrating either the internal or external contact center to the organization’s unified communications infrastructure, allowing the business to capitalize on the enterprise-wide benefits that UC can bring to the customer and the company.”

The product will also provide a seamless integration to Aspect® Workforce Management to enable forecasting, scheduling, and tracking capabilities and Aspect Performance Management for scorecards and analysis that can automatically initiate alerts and actions.

About Aspect
Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center. Aspect provides IT consulting, integration services and business applications. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.  Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC.