Interactive Intelligence - Using CaaS for Contact Center Automation

I'm a contributor to the UC Strategies portal, and my most recent piece was an article about contact center automation, and what Interactive Intelligence is doing with CaaS - Communications as a Service.

It's yet another twist on the cloud and hosted services that I think we're going to see a lot more of in 2010. My article is based on an interview I did with their CEO, Dr. Don Brown, and he shares his thought on what CaaS brings to this burgeoning area of contact center automation. Pretty interesting stuff, and you can read the article here. Comments, as always, are welcome.

ININ Wrapup/Dead Circuits Debut!

Following Monday, the remainder of ININ's Partner Conference was mostly breakouts, a few of which catered to analysts/consultants, but the majority were more hands-on technical or sales sessions for partners. Quite a few were about selling ININ against specific competitors, and I like how they're addressing the reality of a quiet up-and-comer competing against - often successfully - the majors.

I took in a handful of these, and was impressed with how friendly and accessible everyone was, and it was a great way to get to know each other. They're trying hard to get more on our radar, and we need to understand their business better, and I'd say everyone will go home happy. They spent a lot of time on IPA - covered in my earlier post - and while it's too early to know how the market will take to it, they were upfront, addressing both the potential upside, as well as the realities of offering a new type of expertise to help customers become more efficient by working with ININ.

Those are my key takeaways for now, and if ININ isn't on your map for 2010, you need a better map. I'll leave you with a few photos...


One of yesterday's breakouts - Allan Sulkin giving his state of the union update on enterprise telephony.



This morning's analyst breakfast with Don Brown - a bit on the early side, but very engaging.




And now the fun stuff - the Partner Awards Dinner followed by the Battle of the Bands



A few Rock Band stations to get people into the mood. Go Blair!



Making our debut, sans rehearsal, The Dead Circuits - our singer, Pierre Deguire, myself on guitar, and not pictured, ININ's Chris Majer on drums, and ringer Chris Santillo on bass. We didn't win, but we sure had fun, despite no warning about our instruments being tuned down a half step and not being able to hear ourselves. The 5 minutes of rock star fame was worth it, and we'll do it again for sure - but I'll keep my day job. Photo courtesy of Alice Deer - thanks!



The night was young for some of us, and we made our way to the Slippery Noodle, a local blues bar. The band was very friendly, and a few of us joined them at various times on some tunes. Here's Pierre workin' his harp...

Interactive Intelligence Conference - Day 1

So far so good here at Interactive Intelligence's Partner conference. CEO Don Brown set the tone with a bright picture about the company's strong financial performance. I wouldn't underestimate the importance of this, especially with so many major vendors being on shaky ground. They also have a healthy cash balance, and having made their first acquisition with AcroSoft, ININ is in a nice spot to become a consolidator. Don made a good point about ININ being the tortoise, growing slow and steady - while the competitors around them and struggle for a variety of reasons.

The main focus for Don, though, was the launch of IPA - Interaction Process Automation. This is their new focus to enable the mapping of business processes to ININ's underlying contact center technologies. Pretty ambitious idea, since vendors like this generally don't have business process expertise. However, during the demo, Don pointed out that they listen to their customers and learn how to understand their problems. They've applied this to their solutions, and a demo was presented using the process of filing an insurance claim to show how IPA works.

It was an effective way to show how various steps in this process can be automated, but what I really liked was how Web 2.0-style tools were integrated into what otherwise would be a normal phone call between a customer and an agent. In particular they used chat, as well as Google Maps so the agent could visualize where the vehicle was. Lots of interesting possibilities here, although it remains to be seen how much faith customers put in ININ to automate these processes for them.

Basically, I see IPA as a nice value-add and differentiator for existing customers, but it's probably too early to use it as a lead application to attract new customers. On that note, I agree with Don's comment that IPA allows them to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, making it a bit of a Trojan Horse that may open the door for additional ININ offerings.

Later in the morning, Jim Burton of UC Strategies gave a nice overview of the state of the market for telephony vendors. He provided good insights on Avaya/Nortel and the competitive landscape for all the other majors. The main message for me is that telephony is becoming reduced to being a feature server, and call control is no longer the domain of legacy vendors. He pointed out that it only took Cisco 5 years to master this, and Microsoft will get there too.

Bottom line - telephony as a standalone offering is no longer viable or valuable. There are too many ways to get voice - including the cloud - and he sees the best strategy for the telecom vendors being to go vertical and focus on a niche they can dominate. Software vendors, on the other hand, are horizontal solutions, and can't compete as well this way.

Furthermore, the PBX is quickly losing its primacy as an endpoint device, with most of the momentum and new adoption shifting to mobility and softphones. Early on, Jim noted that we communicate more via email than telephony, and this trend will just continue. This makes it pretty hard to keep end users tethered to a desk phone, especially when we travel so much and work increasingly from home.

It's not a great scenario for telecom vendors, and not surprisingly, Jim's message was that if they're to survive this transition they have to integrate voice into business processes - i.e. CEBP. It's a welcome message for this audience, and I guess that was the point. ININ totally gets this idea, and this conference is very much about using business processes to create new forms of value for end users, and of course the channels, who do most of the selling for ININ.

More to come for tomorrow, including the Battle of the Bands in the evening. Our group is The Dead Circuits, and we hope to have our mojo working...

Joe Staples



Don Brown







Jim Burton

Next Stop - Indianapolis and ININ

October is the busiest travel month I've had in a long time, and my first stop is Indianapolis for Interactive Intelligence's Global 2009 Partner Conference. I've been learning more about them recently, and they're doing some interesting things, especially in terms of integrating their contact center applications with business processes. There's lots of room for improvement here, and ININ has done a lot of reverse engineering to figure out how communications technologies can be tied to these processes to make them more efficient.

It's my first ININ partner event, and I'm looking forward to meeting their whole team and learning more about where they're adding value in a space that needs a lot of help.

On the fun side, they're having a Battle of the Bands event, and I'm going to be in one of the groups. I don't play music as much as I used to, but still love it, and couldn't resist throwing my hat into the ring. It looks like one of the names I came up with is going to stick - The Dead Circuits - and as the email threads get longer, this thing is somehow coming together. Time to tune up the guitar...