1. Aspect Software has been the most active company in mergers and acquisitions in the contact center market. For most companies, integrating one new acquisition into its portfolio in a major challenge. What is your approach for integrating multiple acquisitions?
Multiple integrations must be part of a larger single vision in order to be successful. As the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact center, Aspect Software is the result of successfully integrating multiple companies into one over the last four years. The goal behind Aspect Software’s merger and acquisition strategy has always been to expand our footprint in the contact center space by acquiring complementary technologies we can provide to the same buyers through the same channels. We want to offer our customers greater value and reduced complexity, enabling them to get more of their total contact center solution from a single technology partner. To achieve our M&A success, we have focused on three key things: joining forces with companies who share our vision, planning early and thoroughly, and communicating often with all constituencies (customers, partners and employees).
2. What will be Aspect Software’s focus and direction for 2006? What market sectors will be emphasized?
2006 will bring a great focus on execution. We have laid out the plans for our offerings to the market and now we will bring these to fruition while continuing to focus on innovation and a high level of customer service.
In 2006, Aspect Software will also continue to focus on providing proven, innovative products and services that enable our customer’s critical business processes including customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing for in-house and outsourced contact centers.
3. What new product offerings can we expect from Aspect Software?
In the upcoming year, we will be very focused on a balanced approach between evolving our existing technology and delivering new innovation to the market. For example, we will release SIP technology in our existing Signature products as we enter 2006, thereby allowing existing ACDs and Predictive Dialers to evolve to an IP environment with SIP agents. We will offer the latest and greatest VXML in our self-service offering. We will also add open interfaces to the latest versions of the products required in the ecosystem (e.g. Siebel and SAP).
In the area of brand new offerings, we will be bringing a few business process specific Speech Applications to market to help speed up adoption for this type of technology for our customers (for example customer service and collections).
Another exciting area of innovation is in application service provider (ASP), on-demand offerings. We expect this to be very appealing to a section of the community and have partners that will be utilizing our multi-tenancy unified offering to provide this to SME customers.
There will also be significant new releases in the workforce management arena, including hosted offerings and bringing the best of outbound agent management and fixed budget planning into the Aspect eWorkforce Management product.
Optimization and analytics are real growth areas and will see product offerings during the year. This will enable contact centers to optimize their operations in real-time, as well as tremendous flexibility in historic reporting.
Finally we have added full quality monitoring with screen capture and all the latest functionality into our Unified offering. By bringing some of the best features from Aspect Uniphi Suite into the Aspect EnsemblePro technology, we believe we will continue to offer the most scalable and complete Unified offering in the market.
4. Please explain how Aspect Software has integrated Concerto Software’s acquisition of the Rockwell FirstPoint IP offering with Aspect Communication’s IP solutions.
We continue to evolve both product lines but are reusing components, both existing and new developed, that work across multiple products. For example we are utilizing the SIP stack found in the Aspect Call Center ACD in the Aspect Spectrum ACD. We are also developing real-time and historic reporting advancements that will be available on both platforms.
5. Can you please comment on Aspect Software’s financial prospects for 2006?
Aspect Software has been a consistently strong financial performer – anticipating more than $600 million of pro forma revenue in 2005 – and profitable. We expect to continue our organic revenue growth in 2006.
6. What do you anticipate the economic climate to be in 2006? Has the decision making cycle changed over the past few years?
I expect it to continue to have factors pulling in both directions. Interest rates will continue to rise, keeping the pressure on businesses to focus on really impactful initiatives. They will have to focus on customer service, optimize their selling approach and take maximum advantage of each interaction with their customers and prospects. This will continue to provide great opportunity to companies that can offer compelling solutions to the contact center.
In addition, I believe that employment and productivity will continue to rise, offering potential for an improved macro-economic climate. Weighed together I am cautiously optimistic about the environment but more optimistic about the focus on customer interaction and hence our opportunity.
7. Aspect Software has an extremely large number of applications to offer the contact center market. Each offering, i.e. IP, predictive dialers, workforce management, requires a good deal of expertise by a salesforce to sell. With all these offerings, how is your sales organization being organized?
By mid-November 2005 – just six weeks after the close of the merger -- the entire Aspect Software sales force was cross-trained on all product lines. Each salesperson can now listen to a business describe their challenges and understand which of our offerings can best be applied to bring the correct solution. They were trained on all products from our Signature, Unified and Optimization product lines, as well as educated on the business processes of customer service, sales and telemarketing and collections.
The sales executives are organized globally by region. To support them, we have a large team of solution consultants that have more specific expertise in the various technologies. They are then called in to provide the next level of detail around technology and its application to the customer’s requirements.
8. We have heard on the “street” that these acquisitions are being driven by your investors with little regard for the integration challenges that a company typically faces. Please comment.
Firstly, I am not surprised to hear these types of comments as many companies are feeling the need to be more aggressive in competing with us. I can say that this is categorically untrue. We have extremely supportive investors with significant resources. However, they do not involve themselves in the day-to-day operations of the company, which is why we have an experienced management team. Since Jim Foy took over in 2001, we have had a single vision of what we want to be with complete focus on the contact center. Every transaction we have undertaken has fit into our strategy. As the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact center, we have acquired the mass and momentum, the customers and the technology to have the broadest product and service offering in the market. Through our M&A strategy, we have also been able to take advantage of economies of scale to increase our investment in research and development and global support services. With more than 30 years of unparalleled insight into the contact center, Aspect Software partners with our customers to transform the way they interact with their customers. Ultimately that is what we will be judged by.