1. Over the recent past, Aspect Software has been involved in a considerable number of major acquisitions, i.e. Aspect, Melita, Rockwell. Which acquisitions have proven to most beneficial to your organization? Which acquisitions have proven to be the most challenging?
We feel that each one of our acquisitions have proven to be tremendously valuable. Clearly the larger acquisitions have been more challenging, simply given the scale. The reason we believe they have all been successful is because they were all part of a single strategic plan to be able to deliver more of the solution to the contact center market, to the same buyers, through the same sales channels. We were also extremely focused on rapidly establishing the go-forward senior management team, having them build their organizational charts, and communicating this structure to employees on day one of becoming a part of the new company. In a similar fashion, the product vision and roadmap were integrated together into one cohesive plan by day one. We then aggressively communicated this plan to all employees, partners and customers. Finally, we have been able to deliver tangible proof points showing execution to plan.
2. How have you integrated the various sales channels and R&D groups into one organization?
We brought these groups together in late 2005 and completed their training by early 2006. Our combined global sales team, along with our global sales channel partners, have received extensive training via classes, online webinars and product briefing sheets on the full line of Aspect Software products. We have a single sales force that understands the business our customers are in and works with them to understand their specific problems and opportunities. After doing the appropriate discovery with the customers, they then will bring the ideal products to bare that will address their issues and opportunities. The pre-sales engineers have more specific technical expertise and support the sales executives when appropriate based on the products that form the solution. In product areas where we need very specific skill requirements, we have an overlay team with a very deep understanding in a specialized area, such as workforce management.
We have integrated the R&D organization through the vision of one recognized contact center luminary, Gary Barnett, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Aspect Software. Gary is responsible for overseeing corporate planning, product architecture and lifecycle management and leads the company’s technology development efforts, and is responsible for delivering all current and future Aspect solutions. Because he is responsible for both support and development, it has been easy to create a cohesive strategy and then execute on that strategy.
3. Aspect has a broad range of product solutions. In what areas do you anticipate the greatest growth over the next twelve months?
Three main areas of growth: First, we see a continued shift to IP-based solutions and specifically session initiation protocol (SIP). Moving to an IP-based platform can reduce costs and provide extreme flexibility for contact centers with dynamic needs. Secondly, we see growth of unified solutions, which significantly reduce the complexity of integrating multiple solutions from multiple vendors to meet the overall business need – providing easy administration of multiple applications from a single location. Finally, we expect significant growth in the performance optimization area. This includes workforce management, quality management, interaction management and performance management solutions that synchronize people, applications and processes, enabling contact centers to maximize agent performance and align operations by enhancing quality, increasing customer contacts and optimizing contact center resources.
4. Unified Communications is relatively new approach for the contact center. What has been the market acceptance of the UC approach? What has been the acceptance of your UC solutions?
Although the strategic interest is high, we have yet to see much of a business demand from our contact center customers for Unified Communication solutions - not to be confused with unified solutions which bring together multiple capabilities in a single platform and enable customers to unlock additional functionality, as needed. Although, we are seeing an uptick in the number of call centers that have been evaluating the future use of presence and how it can be used to easily access knowledgeable employees through the contact center and beyond, to really impact the customer experience. Similar to the adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) in the past, the acceptance of Unified Communications has been relatively slow but we do believe it will become a more important framework for the decisions around customer interaction solutions in the future.
5. Please comment on your current and future financial health.
We finished 2006 at just over $610 million in revenue with around 2000 employees. Aspect Software continues to be profitable, which gives us the ability to invest significantly in R&D, new innovation and global support services. Today, we are the largest company solely focused on the contact center. In 2006, we were named to the Software 500 top 10 list in terms of revenue growth for the previous year.
We attribute this success to the continued development and growth of our Unified IP and Contact Center Performance Optimization product lines. Additionally, the company has strengthened its global footprint with a growing client list overseas, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Our newest product offerings, Aspect® Performance Management™ and soon-to-be-released, Unified Command and Control™, are a strategic response to our customers’ feedback and business needs, so we expect to see continued long-term financial health in the years to come.
6. As one of the original major players in the predictive dialer arena, what does the future hold for the dialer market?
Our predictive dialers continue to have a reputation as the best and most reliable on the market, but we are also seeing more and more companies reap the benefits from coupling outbound capabilities with call monitoring and recording tools, without the integration hassles caused by integrating multiple technologies from multiple vendors. Analyzing this wealth of data can ultimately optimize collections and telemarketing campaigns. We expect to see more companies implement effective call monitoring and quality management tools with dialing solutions to successfully manage and improve outbound business processes.
Compliance with regulations that impact outbound contacts continues to be a concern for companies using dialers. Newer dialing technology can help those contact centers comply with legislation, such as Ofcom or Do Not Call, allowing them to make adjustments easily. This, coupled with the increase in proactive customer care, will continue to positively impact the demand for new dialers.
7. Since Aspect Software participates in many sectors of the contact center marketplace, do you have an overall strategy that differentiates yourselves from your many competitors?
We are the only company 100 percent focused on the contact center. One of our biggest differentiators comes in the form of our leadership team – three of the industry’s biggest luminaries, Gary Barnett (founding engineer and most recently CEO of Aspect Communications), Roger Sumner (co-inventor of the first ACD and ex-CTO of Rockwell FirstPoint Contact) and Jim Mitchell (founder of Davox). They are backed by more than 1,000 technical experts with an exceptional tenure in the industry. Our product offerings are another significant differentiator. Our Unified IP Contact Center product line has been architected and built from the ground up to meet all of our customers’ contact center needs. The simplicity and reduced complexity of this platform reduces integration requirements and managing multiple vendors, and hence total cost of ownership, and provides more control to contact center leaders.
For customers of our Signature product line who want to add IP agents but not replace their current routing and reporting technology, we provide a very simple and cost-effective solution. This hybrid IP environment provides most of the benefits of IP from a flexibility perspective, without requiring the substantial cost and risk of completely changing out their entire infrastructure. This has proven to be extremely popular with existing customers. Also for our existing customers, our newest offering, Unified Command and Control will allow customers to manage all agents from one centralized point of administration, across multiple automatic call distributors, workforce management, quality management, etc., making it easy for contact centers to easily manage a virtual environment with remote agents. It will also allow them to treat a large distributed agent population as a single logical pool of agents scaling to tens of thousands of agents with local survivable nodes. The Aspect Software strategy continues to be the same strategy that has made us a market leader: listening to our customers’ needs, developing products and solutions that meet those needs, and providing the thought leadership to help companies better understand the demands of their customers.
8. From an industry perspective, what trends have you detected over the past twelve months? In the near future?
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has become the “hot” voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) standard in the industry because of the flexibility it can provide to users of solutions that incorporate SIP. All the major providers of VoIP services are moving to utilize SIP as a key component of their portfolio. In addition to SIP, companies are also evaluating the benefits of implementing open source IP private branch exchanges (PBXs). An open source IP PBX offers a low-cost, flexible solution for companies that require a customized PBX infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of a closed source IP PBX, and many businesses will be turning toward open source in the future to meet their telephony needs.
Also, as mentioned before, we are seeing increased implementations of performance management solutions.
There is a pattern among these individual trends – they are being driven by contact centers looking for opportunities to lower operational costs and maximize productivity. Additionally, quality management, and even performance management solutions, are being implemented to help address growing concerns around security and compliance with new regulations in the contact center. Effective call recording and monitoring are necessary to address regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and manage employee development. Companies that implement performance management and quality management solutions in the future will be able to streamline contact center operations, lower costs and balance consumer demands with the realities of the bottom line.
Ralph Breslauer
Executive Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing
Aspect Software
With more than 20 years of enterprise software experience, Ralph Breslauer serves as Executive Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing at Aspect Software. He joined the company in January 2002 and currently leads the company’s global sales force in its mission to help our customers build the desired relationships with their customers around the critical business processes of collections, customer service, and sales and telemarketing.
In addition, he heads the strategic development and execution of the company’s aggressive branding and marketing efforts.
Prior to Aspect Software, Ralph was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for eRoom Technology, a leading provider of Web-based collaboration software. Previously, he was Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Informix Software’s $700 million TransAct Business Group.
In addition, Ralph has held a number of other executive roles during his career, including Vice President of Marketing for Databases and Tools at Ardent Software and Executive Vice President at System Builder Corporation.
Recognized as an up-and-coming contact center industry thought leader, Ralph frequently contributes articles to leading trade journals and is a regular speaker at industry tradeshows.