London, England, 18 April 2005 (Issued by Frost & Sullivan)—Aspect Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: ASPT), a leading provider of enterprise customer contact solutions, has won the 2005 Frost & Sullivan Product Development Leadership Award for its contribution to the contact centre market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The award recognises the uniqueness and innovative excellence exemplified in the development of Aspect’s pioneering product Aspect Uniphi Suite. This new solution is an advanced open standards-based contact centre operating environment that combines communication routing, data integration, advanced speech, reporting and analytics applications into one tightly integrated software system.
"Frost & Sullivan commends Aspect Uniphi Suite for its comprehensive and consolidated applications that interact seamlessly and provide a single point of control of contact centre operations," said Shomik Banerjee, Frost & Sullivan telecom analyst. "The integrated ACD, IVR and CTI functionality of this system supports the transformation of ‘cost centres’ into ‘profit centres’ by empowering management with a common set of standards-based tools to run more productive operations that support multiple contact channels effectively."
Aspect launched Uniphi Suite, which supports both PSTN and IP switches, in October 2004 to a very receptive industry that continues to honour it with awards, including Product of the Year.
"We’ve been very pleased with the recognition that Aspect Uniphi Suite has garnered," said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Aspect. "The fact that reputable firms like Frost & Sullivan, which has such an in-depth grasp of the global contact centre market, acknowledge its value is highly valid support of the product direction we’re taking."
Aspect Uniphi Suite is representative of the contact center industry shift towards next-generation solutions with open standards-based software products used to manage all customer interactions. At its heart is the Aspect Uniphi Engine, which consists of technology components and interactive processes that organise, map, drive, queue and route information and user requests across multiple media types (voice, chat and e-mail).
To fit their unique business needs, companies can customize the configuration of the Aspect Uniphi Suite, which in addition to the Uniphi Engine includes Uniphi Contact Centre (an advanced call routing application that initially supports up to 250 agents); Uniphi Voice Portal, an advanced interactive voice response (IVR) application; a text to speech (TTS) application; automated speech recognition (ASR) capabilities; and a software developers’ kit. Aspect eWorkforce Management staffing software can also be tightly integrated into Aspect Uniphi Suite.
A true suite of applications, the Aspect Uniphi Suite does not possess a switch fabric. It can work on Aspect Call Centre and Cisco Call Manager, offering support for both traditional TDM as well as IP PBXs. Future releases will include adapters to communicate with the network infrastructure from 3Com Corporation, Avaya Inc., Nortel Networks Limited and Siemens AG, among others.
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