data monitor - routing 2.0 - cebp and bpr beyond the contact center - june 2009

Routing 2.0: CEBP and BPR Beyond the Contact Center (Strategic Focus) DMTC2302/ Published 06/2009

© Datamonitor. This brief is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied

OVERVIEW

Catalyst

With the growth in internet protocol (IP), enterprises will be able to leverage business process routing and unified

communications to manage customer interactions across the contact center and back office environments. The

combination of workflows and intelligent routing in an IP environment can potentially enable contact centers to improve

productivity, profitability and cost reduction.

Summary

This report examines the emerging idea of injecting routing and communications technologies into enterprise processes

and how those communications-enabled processes touch the contact center. It looks at the different technology and

marketing approaches to this new concept of process and workflow and the lack of a clear consensus on terminology. It

explains Datamonitor's new concept of routing 2.0 as a catch-all for these diverse vendor efforts. Additionally, it provides

case studies of specific-use cases, as well as a more general overview of potential uses. It also presents a competitive

landscape, breaking down vendors' differing approaches and technology focuses. The report provides detail on the

following key points:

• Routing 2.0 connects the dots between contact centers, unified communications (UC) and business processes.

• Technologies such as UC and Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP) injecting communications into

enterprise workflow.

• Business process automation tools taking contact center routing into the back office.

• Vendors need for expanded channels and new types of partners.

• The difference between the buyers of routing 2.0 and the buyers of contact center technologies.

STRATEGIC FOCUS REPORT

Routing 2.0: CEBP and BPR Beyond the Contact Center (Strategic Focus) Extending customer interactions in the enterprise

Reference Code: DMTC2302

Publication Date: June 2009

Key Messages



KEY MESSAGES

Routing 2.0 connects the dots between contact centers, UC and business processes

Datamonitor has defined a new category, routing 2.0, primarily as an attempt to clarify the similarities and connections

between numerous emerging categories. While some of the varying technology and category names proffered by

technology vendors do reveal distinctions in approach, for the most part, these categories are more harmonious than

discordant. By using the term routing 2.0, these similarities are highlighted. Routing 2.0 encompasses technologies that

utilize routing technologies and methodologies initially designed for the contact center that optimize enterprise workforce

productivity, increase business responsiveness and improve customer service, and incorporate process automation into the

communications infrastructure.

UC links the enterprise and the contact center

Many of the most highly touted UC technologies return only soft benefits at a time when enterprises are demanding an

incredibly clear return on investment (ROI) for any and every purchase. However, by integrating the enterprise and the

contact center, the value and ROI of UC becomes clearer. Contact center agents are accustomed to the notion of its

presence since it is inherent in contact center management and routing applications. When combined with communications

technologies such as chat, this allows agents to seek help with tough service issues from managers, coaches and others

inside the contact center. But agents often face situations where a service request can only easily be resolved with the help

of knowledge workers or expert resources inside the enterprise but outside the contact center. By linking the pool of

enterprise knowledge workers and experts to the customer service organizations, core UC technologies can provide clear

ROI to enterprises.

CEBP comes in two flavors

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) has become one of the latest buzz-phrases to suffer from over-

exposure. But its promise of more agile and efficient processes and cost savings has given CEBP a life of its own. In

essence, CEBP is what happens when enterprises inject their UC capabilities into their workflow and processes. This

technology is typically used to reduce the time required to complete a specific task or enterprise process, however, some

CEBP technologies focus on fostering better application-to-human connections, while others aim at improving human-to-

human connections.

Business process automation brings routing to the back office

Another routing 2.0 category takes the lessons learned in the contact center and applies them to the broader enterprise.

Business process routing (BPR) applications try to solve the problem of more effectively distributing work across the

enterprise. This means using routing technologies for non-contact center-specific tasks, particularly for non real-time tasks.

BPR also often extends other contact center concepts, like service level agreements (SLA), into the broader enterprise.

BPR tools aim to leverage proven contact center routing technologies to automate business processes. Instead of matching

contact demand with contact center resources, BPR takes routing tools and distributes work items and workflow to non-

contact center employees.

Key Messages



Routing 2.0 sales efforts will require vendors to forge new relationships

Because routing 2.0 aims to optimize enterprise business processes, sales of these technologies will typically require the

involvement of the customer’s C-level executives. Those are not typically the sales targets for contact center technology

deals, and vendors will therefore need to gain access to new offices and have conversations with different value

propositions. Additionally, vendors will need to expand their channels to include business consultancies and other partners

with significant expertise in process and change management.

Table of Contents



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Overview 1 Catalyst 1 Summary 1

Key Messages 2 Routing 2.0 connects the dots between contact centers, UC and business processes 2 UC links the enterprise and the contact center 2 CEBP comes into two flavors 2 Business process automation brings routing to the back office 2 Routing 2.0 sales efforts will require vendors to forge new relationships 3

Market Opportunity 7 Defining the market 8 Market trends 9

Technology Evolution 14 Routing 2.0: Connecting the dots between UC, contact centers and process 14 UC extends into the contact center 15 Communications-enabled business processes 17 Business process routing 20

Customer Impact: undercover routing 2.0 23 Siam Commercial Bank connects the contact center and the back office 23 University of Alabama wins the small ones 24 Rebranding solutions 25

Competitive Landscape 27 Communications technology providers 28 Business process management vendors 38 Comparison of various nomenclatures 39

Go to Market 40 Education, education, education 41 Recommendations 41

APPENDIX 44 Definitions 44 Methodology 45

Table of Contents



Further reading 45 Ask the analyst 45 Datamonitor consulting 45 Disclaimer 45

Table of Contents



TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Word cloud showing popularity of terms 8

Figure 2: Transformation of value from IP over time 12

Figure 3: Taxonomy of routing 2.0 15

Figure 4: CEBP: collaboration and transactions 18

Figure 5: Genesys iWD architecture 32

Figure 6: Numerous interactions can initiate the same IPA process 35

Figure 7: Siemens integrates unified communications with workflow 38

TABLE OF TABLES

Table 1: Vendor-identified routing 2.0 categories 39

Market Opportunity



MARKET OPPORTUNITY

In February 2008, almost three million gallons of partially treated sewage spilled from a treatment plant into the Richardson

Bay, an arm of the San Francisco Bay. An alarm system monitored the treatment plant and a security company monitored

those alerts. On that day in February, an operator at the plant decided to leave only two of six plant pumps on when he left

for the day, fewer than normal. This error in judgment caused more sewage and water to come into the plant than could be

treated and pumped out. As water built up in the treatment plant, the alarm went off as it was supposed to and the security

company was properly alerted. The security company was then supposed to contact the plant operators until someone was

contacted to fix any impending problem. Unfortunately, the security company only called the first contact on their list and

left a voicemail message. No one retrieved that message and partially treated sewage was allowed to flow into the bay for

three hours. The accidental spill was noticed only when a plant operator checked his computer online at home, spotted the

problem and took remedial action.

While potentially more ecologically damaging than most business situations, that scenario perfectly illustrates the problems

of human error and human latency that plague enterprise business processes, across industries and across the spectrum

of company size. Put simply, since business processes are dependent on human intervention, they are subject to stopping

at key points waiting for people to act. The primarily manual nature of these processes are also not at all conducive to the

types of agility and rapid real-time decision making that enterprises desire to use for competitive differentiation and to drive

increased customer satisfaction. These roadblocks also regularly crop up when processes move into and out of contact

centers.

If that sewage treatment alarm business process had incorporated enterprise-class communications technologies or

contact center-like skills-based routing, the outcome could have been more positive. The vendors of those technologies

have been increasingly focusing on ways to portray their technologies as process improvements or process automation

tools. These tools have also been positioned as a boon for customer service and support, primarily through incorporation of

unified communications technology that allows greater integration between the contact center and the enterprise.

This research will focus on the numerous ways that vendors are approaching the problems of adding communications and

collaboration to existing business processes, how that integration plays in and through the contact center and how business

consulting services becomes a greater necessity to deploy this technology successfully. Datamonitor will also detail its

healthy skepticism around some of the vendor positioning, product strategies and the willingness of enterprises to make the

cultural and process changes required to more tightly link the contact center and the enterprise. At the same, we will give

several real-world examples of customers that have used communications technology to improve processes and customer

service and support operations.

Because of disagreements among technology providers, either substantial ones over core underlying concepts about how

this technology can best be deployed to serve customers’ needs, or simply for the sake of marketing differentiation, this

emerging field has been buried under an avalanche of names and acronyms. Although communications-enabled business

processes has the longest history and widest usage, at least six other different names have been bandied about.

Market Opportunity



Figure 1: Word cloud showing popularity of particular routing 2.0 terms

Source: Datamonitor D A T A M O N I T O R

Figure 1 uses a ‘word cloud’ approach to show many of the different names that vendors have been using in the

marketplace. This acts as a visual depiction of the ever-expanding list of vendor-created terminology by creating a

visualization of word frequency on the internet presented as a weighted list. The size of a word represents the number of

times the word was returned as a result of these specific phrases in a Google search: Business Process Routing;

Communications Enabled Business Processes; Communications Based Process Automation; Collaboration Enabled

Business Transformation; Intelligent Workload Distribution; and Interaction Process Automation. This word cloud acts as

essentially a very rough approximation of that term’s popularity. What becomes immediately obvious from this figure is that

business process and communications are common elements of this plethora of naming options.

Defining the market

Since there is clearly no agreement in terminology in the vendor community, Datamonitor has decided to take the

proverbial bull by the horns and create its own wrapper term to encompass all of these technologies: routing 2.0. This is

not intended to replace all of the vendor-created terms; rather its purpose is to provide a handy category under which all of

Market Opportunity



these other terms can comfortably sit. In this research, we will be using routing 2.0 as a superset for all technologies that sit

at the intersection of communications and process.

In new and competitive technology areas, vendors often resort to the time-honored tactic of fear, uncertainty and doubt

(FUD); in this emerging area, FUD seems to be less of a problem that marketing fluff. Many technology providers have

become overzealous, including everything but the kitchen sink under their routing 2.0 heading. Basic proactive contact

applications, for example, may well have a process element (a specific trigger in an application that kicks off the outbound

contact), but that story is no different to the proactive contact story from a few years ago. Enterprises must be careful to

understand which technologies are truly new and which are simply being relabeled with a more cotemporary name to give

them greater marketing appeal.

Market trends

This increase in market activity, mainly in corporate marketing and less so in actual deals and deployments, has not simply

appeared out of thin air. The buzz around routing 2.0 concepts is occurring in the context of numerous market forces,

including macro-economic conditions and the need for vendors to increase their addressable market at a time when

adoption of new technology has slowed significantly, which can rightfully be seen as drivers.

The economy pushes enterprises towards efficiency

Obviously, the impact of the economic downturn must be taken into consideration. As consumer spending slows,

enterprises are looking for ways to drive higher customer retention while, at the same time, improve the efficiency of their

organizations and that organization’s processes. The former driver makes sense: if fewer customers are buying,

enterprises need to focus on keeping the customers that they have already secured. The latter driver is a natural reaction to

tough economic times, but cost-cutting measures on their own tend to do more harm than good. So, companies are

seeking out ways to improve existing processes. Enter numerous vendors with routing 2.0-like messages that point to

improved efficiency, either in smaller, incremental doses or in wholesale revamping of major enterprises processes.

The problem for vendors is that enterprise spending on technology, especially in some key sectors for the contact center

and communications technology providers, has slowed appreciably and, in some regions and markets, has disappeared

suddenly. Enterprises have decided to make do with the technology they have already implemented, which makes the

routing 2.0 message harder to pitch. Processes can still be improved, but if it requires professional services and more

technology, many companies are currently content with their less-than-perfect processes.

Vendor strategies are changing

As little as four years ago, the internet protocol (IP) contact center space in the mature markets was still dominated by a

shift in customer thinking from ‘whether to transition from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to IP’ to ‘when to transition from

TDM to IP.’ Vendors had education campaigns galore on the benefits offered by IP technologies and the mindset did

eventually shift. The question became not ‘when,’ but ‘how.’ The discussion, at least in North America and Western Europe,

was, however, still around transitioning from older technology to IP-based systems. Geographies with less-developed

infrastructure (namely Asia Pacific and Central and Latin America) were able to skip over this discussion and implement IP-

based contact centers from the outset. The biggest seismic shakeups in the IP contact center market were really caused by

vendor consolidation, not major directional changes.

Market Opportunity



However, in the past few years the strategies of vendors in this space have started to change and diversify. In just the past

year, for example:

• Avaya brought in numerous new executives, started work to streamline and simplify both its internal organization

and its product list and began an ambitious program to change its sales model to a much-more channel-led

approach.

• Aspect Software, which had been talking quite a bit about unified communications (UC) for the contact center,

started rejiggering its language and began talking about UC applications and services instead. The distinct lack

of ‘for the contact center’ shows significantly broader enterprise ambitions, but also shows the way that the

company can pitch its services to new buyers within the same organization to which it had previously sold

contact center technologies.

These types of strategy shifts will become more common as large enterprise vendors find it more difficult to win the

competitive displacement deals that are now the bread and butter of that market, and also as enterprises begin to see

customer interactions as core to enterprise value. Because these shifts in strategy may be subtle (increased focus on

distributed deployments that might include branches and work-at-home-agents) or more clear (enterprise-focused UC that

just happens to include the contact center), enterprises must be sure to fully understand the vendors’ directions, and more

importantly, be comfortable with these course changes.

The competitive landscape is shifting and converging

The troubles at Nortel, increased consolidation and the significantly lowered profile of some longtime enterprise

communications vendors have started a competitive landscape shift in the enterprise communications space. However, this

change is minor when compared to the growing competitive overlap between companies from four formerly distinct camps:

• private branch exchange (PBX)/communications vendors;

• data networking vendors;

• software/enterprise applications vendors;

• hosted and open source vendors.

All of these camps appear to be moving towards a common middle ground that makes competitive differentiation tough.

Coming from the software world, Microsoft, for example, has yet to fully embrace the world of enterprise communications,

partly because it has lacked the integration channel with telephony know-how to turn a UC offering, like its Office

Communications Server (OCS) into a true PBX replacement. But with the help of partners such as Aspect Software, which

comes from the communications space, Microsoft’s UC message has been gaining strength. At the same time, larger

carriers such as Verizon and its Verizon Business Services unit have been building out hosted communications capabilities.

This feeling of a rapidly changing marketplace makes customer unease inevitable and vendors have to provide greater

depth in their customer education efforts to explain the strengths and weaknesses of the offerings from each type of

competitive vendor.

Market Opportunity



The value of IP transformation has been rising

The value that enterprises derive from their transition to IP-based technologies improves as those technologies become

more high value (see Figure 2). Enterprises began the transition to IP by moving their telephony networks from TDM to IP

driven by increasingly solid reliability, quality and security from business-focused voice over IP (VoIP) services. While the

concerns over voice quality made the overall transition slower than expected, it is no longer unusual for enterprises to look

to IP-based telephony as a key business objective. The primary driver and benefit of this move was a clear reduction in

telephony transport costs. And while it is hard to dispute the value of cost-savings to an enterprise, IP at this level was not

truly a game-changing technology.

Once IP telephony was in place and proven successful within enterprises, the contact center began to experiment with the

technology. IP endpoints (primarily IP phones, but also softphones and USB headsets) began to spread into contact

centers. However, the primary driver was once again cost reduction; the IP endpoints reduced an enterprise’s equipment

and infrastructure overhead. The value of IP to the enterprise did, however, increase in the case of true IP endpoints which

reduced or eliminated the need for complex and expensive computer telephony integration (CTI) projects. This cut costs

while also providing agents with better information, reduced key metrics like average handle time and, theoretically,

provided a richer and more satisfying customer experience.

Market Opportunity



Figure 2: Transformation of value from IP over time


Contact centers and enterprises have, however, started to explore some truly higher value benefits of IP: virtualization of

disparate in-house contact centers into single organizations with unified administration and a virtual queue that could

incorporate numerous agent pools; work-at-home agent models; improved scalability; expanded reporting capabilities; and

easier integration of multichannel interactions into a customer interaction organization.

Additionally, presence engines and enterprise-wise UC solutions offer the promise of having a unified enterprise (that

includes the contact center, branches locations and back office) in a single, IP-centric environment, as seen in Figure 2. To

achieve these high-value business benefits, enterprises continue to need business and process transformation services;

companies that add these capabilities in house can differentiate themselves over the next few years. It is this

transformation to IP-centric unified enterprises that facilitates routing 2.0 technologies.

Reuse comes to the fore

Although a few enterprises are looking at the confluence of the recessionary environment and greater access to

transformative technologies as an opportunity for something akin to a paradigm shift, most are looking for more incremental

Market Opportunity



changes. Routing 2.0 technologies arguably hold the promise for both incremental and explosive changes. But, for either

strategy or approach to make sense, enterprises need to be able to continue to get value from technologies in which they

have already invested. Most routing 2.0 solutions are built, at least partially, from such existing technologies as IP

telephony, UC components and contact center infrastructure. That level of reuse can, however, lead to customer

incredulity: are these new solutions, or simply existing components rebranded to make them seem like a higher-value

solution?

Enterprises look for consistency in communications

Repeatedly contacting different people to convey the same information almost inevitably results in different versions of the

information for each recipient. Enterprises would like to ensure that the same message gets to everyone who is required to

hear it. This is true for customer communications as well, but this issue can be even more acute inside organizations where

there needs to be a tight alignment of actions. That alignment needs to be supported with reliable, flexible communications.

Technology Evolution



TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION

As contact centers and enterprises both move towards an IP communications infrastructure, companies can begin to

consider ways to optimize processes across the two organizations. There are some specific new routing 2.0 technologies

that vendors have created to address this need. But there are also solution categories comprised of existing technologies

bundled with technology and business consulting to enhance that process-level connection between the enterprise and the

contact center. Some of these technologies and solutions are also deployed in enterprise-only settings (namely automating

or optimizing processes that never touch the contact center). This section, however, focuses on technologies that can

include contact centers.

Routing 2.0: Connecting the dots between UC, contact centers and process

Routing 2.0, as mentioned previously, is not standard industry nomenclature. But since the technology community cannot

agree on a single term (or even a single category) to call this collection of technologies, Datamonitor felt it necessary to

create a wraparound category. This category heading is primarily an attempt to clarify the similarities and connections

between numerous emerging categories. Again, while some of the varying technology and category names proffered by

technology vendors do reveal distinctions in approach, for the most part, these categories are more harmonious than

discordant. By using the term routing 2.0, these similarities are highlighted.

Routing 2.0 encompasses technologies that:

• Utilize routing technologies and methodologies initially designed for the contact center.

• Optimize enterprise workforce productivity.

• Increase business responsiveness and improve customer service.

• Incorporate process automation into the communications infrastructure.

• Increase visibility into operational performance.

• Automate the prioritization and distribution of work to the best skilled resource.

Figure 3 illustrates the wealth of technologies that fall within Datamonitor’s definition of routing 2.0. Most prominent from a

contact center perspective are the integration between the enterprise and the contact center, and the common UC

infrastructure increasingly being deployed across both organizations. Additionally, routing 2.0 includes two forms of

communications-enabled business processes: the transaction-oriented category and the collaboration-oriented category.

Finally, Datamonitor also includes the business process routing category and its process automation tools and products

under the routing 2.0 heading.




Figure 3: Taxonomy of routing 2.0


UC extends into the contact center

At its most basic, UC refers to the ability to manage all communications, whether voice, email, fax or instant messaging,

through a single interface. Some of the technologies that fall under the UC heading include an integrated personal

directory, IP softphones, click-to-call capabilities, presence engines and indicators, unified messaging, web (video and

audio) conferencing and twinning to allow a single number for all devices.




UC has suffered something very much akin to an identity crisis over the past three years. There was little agreement about

what actually constituted UC, either among technology consumers or technology manufacturers. The varying definitions,

and its inherently amorphous nature, diluted the ‘brand’ for UC. The ever-worsening economy posed an even more

important problem for UC. Many of the highly touted UC technologies returned only soft benefits at a time when enterprises

were demanding an incredibly clear return on investment (ROI) for any and every purchase.

However, by integrating the enterprise and the contact center, the value and ROI of UC becomes clearer. Contact center

agents are accustomed to the notion of presence since it is inherent in contact center management and routing

applications. When combined with communications technologies such as chat, this allows agents to seek help with tough

service issues from managers, coaches and others inside the contact center. But agents often face situations where a

service request can only easily be resolved with the help of knowledge workers or expert resources inside the enterprise

but outside the contact center.

It is in those situations where some core UC technologies can provide ROI to enterprises. Presence engines are often the

most visible UC technology and UC clients allow users to indicate their presence information. When contact center agents

are able to tap into that enterprise presence information, they can rapidly identify the enterprise workers available to help

them with the more difficult service requests. Depending on the processes dictated by the contact center and the

enterprise, the agent can then call, instant message or email that worker for assistance. To facilitate collaboration, the

agent can initiate a conference call with the enterprise worker, transfer the caller to the worker directly, or simply get

information from the worker and solve the caller’s issue.

In the ideal case, this process of using UC to pull enterprise workers into customer service situations helps solve callers’

issues in a single call. First call resolution (FCR) has become an increasingly important metric for the contact center, one

heavily used as a proxy measure for how effective a contact center is at doing its job. If UC helps drive higher first call

resolution rates, then the ROI for these solutions is fairly easy to prove. The value from this increase in FCR may even be

more important than it seems at first blush: since customers now use numerous self-service channels to resolve their own

issues, the calls entering contact centers tend to be more complex and of higher value. Furthermore, FCR has a direct

correlation to reduced call volumes; if a problem is solved at the first attempt, the customer has no reason to call back a

second time, resulting in lower operating expenditures.

Improved FCR also has attendant softer benefits. Customer satisfaction with a company presumably rises when it can

quickly and efficiently provide effective customer service. Higher customer satisfaction should lead to higher customer

retention—a key goal for most enterprises in a down economic climate.

Examples of this UC-based routing 2.0 approach include agents at a retail bank’s contact center connecting customers

interested in a home equity loan to the most appropriate loan expert. It could also include an agent of a manufacturing

company simply pinging someone in the shipping department to get the most up-to-the-second status on a part being

shipped to a customer. In some cases, routing 2.0 technologies would allow contact center agents to contact workers in

branch offices or in retail locations. A real world case study of a financial services company’s use of UC in the contact

center is included in the Customer Impact section.

While many enterprises allow, or even foster, ad hoc connections between the enterprise and the contact center, more

formalized products and processes allow for easier management and greater visibility into the service process. Numerous




contact center technology vendors have created specific UC-based products to allow contact center agents to identify and

contact the best enterprise resource for assistance with specific service calls. The branding of most of these solutions

seems to pivot on the word 'expert': Expert Anywhere (Nortel), Expert Advisor (Cisco) and Ask-An-Expert (Aspect Software)

among others.

But, despite the fact that ROI is theoretically easier to achieve with these solutions than with general UC, these products

still face many challenges. The biggest challenge is how, from a process perspective, to make these experts part of a

customer-facing organization. These workers need to be compensated or rewarded for their work, or other forms of

incentives need to be offered to change the mindset from ‘accounts payable clerk’ to ‘customer-facing employee.’

Processes must also be established to ensure that contacts are allocated fairly among the experts to avoid overloading any

single agent. This problem can be exacerbated for particularly helpful or friendly experts, since agents will understandably

try to contact that same expert any time an issue comes up. Additionally, enterprises must create the means for knowledge

workers’ skills to be inventoried and rated in much the same manner as contact center agents. This could be as simple as a

self-rating system or a more complex evaluation process.

The experts must also be allowed to set some boundaries, such as what contact channels they prefer, and when they can

be contacted. For example, to more fairly distribute contacts, skills-based routing can be applied to connect agents with

Expert A, but only during morning hours. Expert B could be contacted Mondays and Thursday afternoons, and so on. The

flipside of that is that contact center agents must also be trained on guidelines that dictate which experts they can contact

under which conditions. In essence, companies need to set up collaboration rules of engagement.

While there are successful case studies of contact center-enterprise integration and collaboration, progress has been

slower than expected. Vendors such as Avaya have been touting the power of UC to bridge the contact center and the

enterprise for at least four years but real-world implementations are thin on the ground. Part of the blame lies with

enterprise still seeing the contact center as a cost center, which makes investment in integration seem like throwing good

money after bad. Additionally, because incorporating enterprise experts into customer service would require changes to

contact center processes, some contact centers themselves have been resistant to this type of technology.

At the same time, market forces show vendors more heavily pushing this UC in the contact center message. The tight

partnership between Aspect Software and Microsoft around just this issue has helped give other vendors a sense of

urgency around any outstanding contact center-enterprise integration technology initiatives.

Communications-enabled business processes

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) has become one of the latest buzz-phrases to suffer from over-

exposure. However, its promise of more agile and efficient processes and cost savings has given CEBP a life of its own.

Actually defining CEBP, however, can be difficult since the definition often depends on the definer. Companies that have

created specific new offerings around CEBP will define the features of their product as the features of the broader category.

Those vendors that have not crafted any new products will likely lump plenty of existing technologies under the CEBP

banner.

For the most part, CEBP sits at one end of a continuum of enterprise transformation. A transition to IP technology,

particularly in the voice realm, and personal efficiency tools leads to packaged UC technology and then ultimately to highly

customizable CEBP. In essence, CEBP is what happens when enterprises inject their UC capabilities into their workflow




and processes. This technology is typically used to reduce the time required to complete a specific task or enterprise

process. In the healthcare arena, that could be lowering the time required to discharge a patient from a hospital from four

hours to one hour, while in the insurance industry, it could be shaving a week off the time required to take and process a

customer’s claim.

Figure 4: CEBP: collaboration and transactions


Figure 4 details Datamonitor’s view of CEBP, including two subsets of the technology: CEBP focused on collaboration and

CEBP focused on transactions. Both types have some common benefits, including removing latency from processes, the

most commonly cited advantage of CEBP.

The collaboration-oriented approach has been most vocally championed by Cisco. To make its focus absolutely clear,

Cisco refers to its routing 2.0 approach as collaboration-enabled business transformation (CEBT). Datamonitor classifies

CEBT as an example of collaboration-oriented CEBP. Collaboration-oriented CEBP involves embedding communications

abilities into business processes so that the processes (or applications running in these processes) can trigger




collaboration. The goal is to then connect decision makers and key employees with each other to drive faster decision

making.

To use the example of a hospital again, this form of CEBP can help reduce the response time for a nurse to respond to a

patient that requires assistance. The patient presses a call button on the bedside console. That call signal then kicks off a

process of identifying the appropriate nurse to respond to the patient (most appropriate in this case can be judged by

physical proximity or by skills or scheduling). Once the system identifies the appropriate person, an alert can be sent to the

nurse’s wireless IP phone. That nurse would then receive a text and/or audio notification, with a click to call back the

patient. The patient and the nurse are then directly connected. This same concept can be applied to more acute needs,

such as identifying and contacting specialists in an emergency room setting and creating a shared collaboration

environment for the specialist and the emergency room staff to consult on a specific patient. There are also scenarios

across all major verticals, including an example that Cisco uses, which involves it dramatically accelerating its own process

for deal registration and approval for its resellers. Cisco claims to have created a $30m impact on its annual sales through

these improvements.

The transactional-focused flavor of CEBP can be illustrated by the initial example of the sewage treatment plant detailed in

the Market Opportunity section. As a further example, and remaining with the hospital theme, the patient discharge process

could trigger a notification to the hospital’s housekeeping staff to prepare that room for the next patient. There is no human

latency involved; as soon as the previous patient is discharged, the housekeeping staff is alerted to their next task.

However, in contrast to the collaboration-focused CEBP, there is no human-to-human connection required. In this example,

the patient discharge system communicates with the housekeeping staff, or potentially starts another process within a

housekeeping scheduling application. In this case, the difference between the two strains of CEBP can be seen as the

difference between a focus on effectiveness for the collaboration-oriented technology and a focus on efficiency for the

transactional-oriented technology.

Despite the potential benefits of CEBP, the field remains under-defined in the minds of customers, partially because of

vendors that have simply rebranded their existing technologies, such as outbound notification products, as CEBP without

integrating those technologies into true routing 2.0 solutions. But even when customers do recognize CEBP as a category,

they are often unclear as to what the technologies and approaches are capable of and what types of benefits they could

reasonably expect from such solutions. Even when customers decide to pursue CEBP solutions, many vendors claim there

is yet another problem. In numerous briefings, Datamonitor heard that too many customers see CEBP as a

communications play and therefore expect CEBP to follow the model of a hardware deployment, with the same low

percentage of associated services cost that would come with a PBX deployment. In reality, CEBP is much more akin to a

software deployment, with the need for continuous improvement and significant changes to processes. Additionally, like

software implementation, customers need to budget for systems integration and consulting.

All of these challenges point to the need for vendors to develop partner ecosystems in order to fully implement CEBP.

Business process consultants, for example, are required to help companies map their existing processes and identify

opportunities for improvements. Systems integrators and other technology consultants can help tailor the CEBP solutions to

an enterprise’s specific environment and also help integrate the communications technology with vertical-specific

applications. There are also opportunities for independent software vendors to incorporate reusable communications

elements within their applications to facilitate their incorporation into a CEBP solution. Finally, vendors need to develop a

solutions sales methodology to help customers understand what they can actually do with CEBP.




It is exactly this need for phases of consulting (pre-deployment process mapping and sales consulting, deployment-period

systems integration, and post-deployment continuous improvement efforts) that makes Datamonitor skeptical of any

widespread adoption of CEBP in the near-term. Technology providers argue that the benefits of CEBP are ironclad and

easily measurable: a process takes two weeks fewer than it did before, for example. But when those benefits are loaded

behind a ‘you need to invest money to make money’ message, customers facing lowered sales and weakened prospects

are likely to balk. There are, of course, degrees of complexity for these CEBP projects. Customers are likely to be more

receptive to projects that provide tangible, incremental benefits than they are to the revamp the entire supply chain

process-types of implementations.

Business process routing

CEBP and UC in the contact center both extend the message that enterprise communications and contact center

technology providers have been pushing into the marketplace for several years. At heart, the benefits of both of these

categories of technology are the same benefits cited for UC, just writ large. However, another routing 2.0 category seems

to take the lessons learned in the contact center and apply them to the broader enterprise. Business process routing (BPR)

applications try to solve the problem of more effectively distributing work across the enterprise. This means using routing

technologies for non-contact-center-specific tasks, particularly for non real-time tasks. BPR also often extends other contact

center concepts, like service level agreements (SLA), into the broader enterprise. The technology vendors in this space

tend to highlight the ability of these tools to automate processes, but the heart of the automation functionality is the ability to

distribute and route the work tasks to the correct resource. Hence, Datamonitor feels comfortable using the BPR moniker,

while recognizing that some solutions provide more automation than others.

BPR tools, particularly those being marketed by Genesys and Interactive Intelligence, aim to leverage proven contact

center routing technologies to automate business processes. Instead of matching contact demand with contact center

resources, BPR takes routing tools and distributes work items and workflow to non-contact center employees. Other

contact center concepts also get translated into this new, routing 2.0 context. Instead of presence indicating which agent is

available to take the next incoming contact, BPR presence indicates which worker is available to be assigned a work task

to speed up processes.

Enterprises today rarely differentiate their back office business processes based on the value of that task, or the value of

the customer to which that task is related. Even when an enterprise does recognize distinctions between the value of

different processes, it usually lacks a way to enforce a set of business rules about how to handle the higher value

processes. Thus, the high value processes may take significantly longer than similar processes with a lower value. And

enterprises often have a serious lack of visibility into their processes, beyond the manual process of a manager calling an

employee and asking at which stage in the process they are stuck.

Interactive Intelligence calls the category of technology designed to address these problems 'communications-based

process automation'. Its forthcoming product in that category will be called Interaction Process Automation (IPA). Genesys’

offering has been dubbed intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD). Both products aim to eliminate latency in business

processes, increase employee performance and provide enterprises with greater visibility into their performance and their

processes. Both companies also claim that they provide hard ROI-types of improvements: reducing the amount of time it

takes for a sales lead to be received, logged, qualified, and distributed to a sales person from 28 business hours to two

business hours, for example.




Datamonitor believes that this BPR concept holds significant promise, at least in the long term. One reason is the sheer

volume of work tasks inside an enterprise. Enterprises have implemented specialized tools to handle contact center tasks,

but the number of non-contact center tasks dwarfs that of contact center tasks. So, why should there not be specialized

tools to route and manage those tasks?

Another factor that argues in favor of a BPR approach is the flexibility of the types of tasks that can be handled and the

ways in which they can be handled. Tasks can be one-time pieces of work, such as completing a form, or ongoing, multi-

step tasks, such as the chain of tasks required for an insurance adjuster to complete a claim. Those multi-part processes

can be divvied up so that employee A can work on five steps of the tasks based on their availability and employee B can

work on a different five steps based on their availability.

Maybe most promising though is the ability to extend the SLA metaphor to enterprise processes, allowing enterprises to set

up complex business rules that differentiate tasks based on their value. The new service initiation allows requests for a

long-time, loyal customer can be prioritized to be handled before a change of address from a relatively new customer.

However, BPR provides the flexibility to change those priorities so that the address change could become the top priority

when a new billing cycle nears.

Of course, the same challenges around services-heavy deployments that plague CEBP will also impact the adoption of

BPR, at least in the near-term. Some BPR products are less services-heavy than most CEBP solutions. The complexity of

process mapping and process change, however, seems better suited for companies looking to capitalize on technology

investments than for any company in a ‘cost-cutting at all costs’ environment.

Why choose a contact center vendor for process automation?

BPR providers have numerous answers to that question, some more compelling than others. Here are five arguments as to

why a communications company is the right provider for this type of solution.

• The most common processes in any business are people-oriented – such as human resources processes

for new employees, or accepting loan applications. Communications is the art of people interacting, which makes

the company that understands communications a natural fit for people-focused processes.

• Contact center infrastructure was built specifically to receive and rout incoming calls to a contact center

– this is actually a multistep event. The contact center vendors also know how to track and report on those

multistep events. The same underlying logic can be applied to the steps in a business process that must be

captured, prioritized, routed and tracked.

• That technology is widely adopted and has proven its value for tens of thousands of companies –

technologies such as skills-based routing, presence and reporting have all been used for decades.

• Communications companies must constantly integrate their technologies with other systems – ranging

from CRM systems to back-end data stores to third-party IVR systems. Integration expertise provides a

significant chunk of the value of BPR, as the process automation tools must also integrate with numerous other

systems.




• By having the process automation and the communication functions reside on a unified platform, the

enterprise has a direct connection between all the events inside a business – a phone call placed and

recorded as a part of the processing of an insurance claim will be stored as part of a single, common process

record.

Although that line of reasoning comes directly from Interactive Intelligence, it could just as easily apply to any other vendor

with a strong history in communications technologies. Much of this reasoning makes sense, at least in theory. Some of the

arguments, however, fail to provide compelling differentiation from other entrenched interests that also claim to improve

processes, namely workflow systems and enterprise application providers, including business process management suites.

It also fails to address the ability of a company with relationships with the customer service/contact center organizations to

break into sales deals that require the involvement of C-level executives.

The case for choosing process automation from a communications vendor could even be stronger when very large

enterprises look at a technology provider such as Genesys, since Genesys’s switch-independent history give it a little more

neutrality when it comes to optimizing processes. The thinking here would go that it simply does not matter what physical

communications infrastructure such as switches are installed throughout the enterprise, since Genesys’s core

communications platforms will work with them all. That is not to say that enterprises need not pore over the details of

Genesys’s specific process automation and workload distribution solution, just that Genesys has a history of playing

exceptionally well in a heterogeneous switching environment. Moreover, Genesys has a partner eco-system that includes

companies with strong process automation and process reengineering services, including Accenture and IBM Global

Services. Even so, Genesys too will have to shift from its traditional target buyer, such as the vice president of customer

service, to a CIO-targeted sales pitch.

Customer Impact



CUSTOMER IMPACT: UNDERCOVER ROUTING 2.0

Lost beneath the avalanche of marketing around routing 2.0 strategies are actual customers. An NEC executive told

Datamonitor that, in the past year, the company has started to get involved in request for proposals in which the customers

specifically cite CEBP as the project goal. But such customers are clearly very early adopters and are far more the

exception than the rule. In fact, many, if not most, of the customers cited in case studies provided by vendors to show the

benefits of CEBP or CBPA or CEBT would not consider their projects in those terms. From a customer point of view, the

projects would be centered on proactive contact or providing superior service by connecting customers to the actual

experts in their company or getting patients discharged from the hospital more quickly.

This issue of categories defined by technology vendors not directly matching up with the categories customers use to

delineate their problems is certainly nothing new. Early CRM efforts were seen by customers as technology projects to

provide better sales forecasting tools or a better territory management to sales management. Today, most companies

would agree that such projects fall under the CRM rubric, but at the time, the problems in the customers’ eyes were more

tactical.

Routing 2.0, however, may be a breed apart. Like UC, its amorphous nature lends itself too easily to U.S. Supreme Court

Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’ This is even more of an issue, since

many CEBP-like solutions are assembled from technologies that have existed and have been deployed for many years.

This makes it much easier for communications and contact center vendors to point to almost all of their recent customer

wins as examples of some routing 2.0 technology.

Common technology category names are, however, less important than the underlying problems customers face and the

solutions technology providers create for them. Therefore, if we are to know routing 2.0 when we see it, it would be helpful

to understand what types of real-world solutions get classed in these categories. In the contact center milieu, many of the

case studies of successful routing 2.0 implementations concern integrating the enterprise and the contact center through

UC built atop an IP infrastructure. Other solid examples of routing 2.0 come from automation efforts, such as proactive

outreach. The next section details two case studies, both involving contact center deployments, that help give a sense of

how routing 2.0 has played out so far in the real world.

Siam Commercial Bank connects the contact center and the back office

Alcatel-Lucent has been heavily promoting a routing 2.0-type implementation at one of its financial services customers,

Siam Commercial Bank. The bank’s story is an especially interesting case given several years of contact center

infrastructure vendors talking about, and building technology to help facilitate, the blurring of the lines between the contact

center and the broader enterprise. Siam Commercial Bank’s deployment shows both how enterprises in emerging markets

can and leapfrog ahead of enterprises in mature markets and how flexibility provided by IP contact centers paired with

collaboration technologies allow enterprises to provide the optimal mix of customer service and revenue generation.

The problem: too many systems, too few results

Siam Commercial Bank, established in 1906, is one of the leading retail and commercial banks in Thailand. It has almost

1,000 branches in Thailand and has more than 10.5 million deposit customers, along with more than one million credit card

holders. As the bank grew, it accumulated a multi-site—and multi-vendor—contact center set up. As with many multi-

Customer Impact



vendor solutions, Siam Commercial Bank’s customer service center faced instability due to the need for kludge-y

integrations among the different components in the multivendor solution. This left the bank facing intermittent system

failure, an unacceptable state of affairs for a customer-service focused organization, especially one that had a contact

center organization that handled more than 1.5 million calls per month. The bank decided to consolidate its infrastructure

and chose Alcatel-Lucent, due to its approach to routing and its ability to integrate with the bank's existing investments. The

extensive solution that Alcatel-Lucent created for Siam Commercial Bank included OmniGenesys IP Call Center, and the

Genesys Workforce Management application to manage the contact center resources.

The solution also included the CC Teamer contact center collaboration tool, Alcatel-Lucent’s hallmark collaboration system,

as well as a robust voice and data network to provide the infrastructure required to link its contact center agents with

knowledge workers inside the company. This was the region’s first deployment of CC Teamer. CC Teamer has presence

embedded into the interface, allowing agents to identify appropriate back office workers on the company’s local area

network (LAN), check the availability status of those workers and then connect to them for assistance with a customer

contact.

The solution: collaboration between the contact center and the back office

In its initial iteration, Siam Commercial Bank created basic routing 2.0 functionality, which allowed agents unable to answer

specific customer queries to use CC Teamer to identify the appropriate back office worker who could answer the question.

The agent would then hand off the interaction to the knowledge worker. In this way, the customer query was usually

answered in a single contact and customer satisfaction levels noticeably climbed. But, this system was not perfect; because

the knowledge workers were not trained in sales techniques, they could successfully answer the customer queries, but they

did not close any deals. Customer satisfaction went up, but revenues generated by the contact center began to fall.

Because it was carefully monitoring the results of the collaborative system, Siam Commercial Bank quickly noticed the

problem and identified the root cause. Due the flexible infrastructure of the Alcatel-Lucent solution, the bank changed its

collaborative processes. Now, customers are placed in a conference with both the experts and the agents. The agents and

knowledge workers share customer information and documents through their desktops while supervisors can review

conferences in real-time and can also track activity through historical reporting. More importantly, the knowledge workers

can solve customer issues and the sales-focused agents can close any sales opportunities, all in a single interaction. This

keeps customer satisfaction high, but also allows the bank to hit its revenue targets.

University of Alabama wins the small ones

The University of Alabama's Health Services Foundation supports more than 700 physicians serving a broad and diverse

population in an academic group setting. The Foundation provides those physicians with a Management Services

Organization that manages all revenue cycle activities, including everything from scheduling through to billing and

collections.

The problem: small balances equal large headaches

The university had a large number of patients with outstanding bills, but many of the balances were far too low to make a

collections agency a financially viable option. The university tried to collect these balances through the traditional means of

having contact center agents call the patients, but it found that actually collecting on these overdue accounts usually

Customer Impact



required multiple patient contacts and that fact made the model untenable. In fact, an internal analysis of the organization’s

collections procedure determined that the average cost of an agent contacting a patient to request payment was about $5

per call. Since many of the patients with outstanding balances owed only $10 or $20, multiple patient contacts would make

the collections process cost the same as, or even more than, the amount actually recovered. Additionally, since the

organization had limited resources, it had to focus on pursuing collections for those patients with higher outstanding

balances. As a result of this, patient accounts with balances of less than $100 were usually written off as uncollectible.

The solution: proactive outreach

The university decided to reduce agent involvement in the process to dramatically reduce the costs of the collections effort.

It implemented an integrated solution built atop Avaya’s technology, including products from Avaya’s Proactive Contact

Management Solutions and Avaya’s Self-Service Solutions portfolios, as well as an application developed by Avaya’s local

partner. The solution proactively calls low-balance and ‘deadbeat’ accounts and offers them the opportunity to pay off their

balances via credit card. If the patient agrees to pay off the balance, the system routes the contact to the Avaya Interactive

Response IVR solution. Avaya’s partner’s application provides credit card authorizations in real time. This proactive

campaign allows the university to make collection calls with little or no agent involvement.

This solution has had a clear revenue impact for the University of Alabama. After deploying the solution, the university saw

a 10% increase in payments per year from those outstanding accounts. While 10% may seem like a small, incremental

improvement, it translates into $600,000 per year of additional revenue annually.

Because the IVR also handles all incoming calls regarding account status or balance, the university has dramatically

reduced the number of interactions handled by live agents. In fact, the decrease in live-agented interactions led to a 27%

staff reduction providing clear and direct cost savings. There are also softer benefits, as the university has created a

consistent customer experience by providing a standard self-service interface for customers calling with billing and account

status issues.

Rebranding solutions

These above two case studies show hard ROIs, something critical in the current economic environment. However, the

issue of whether these solutions represent an actual sea change in the capabilities of technology or simply a new name for

old technologies remains.

The Siam Commercial Bank case study is simply a UC deployment that happens to connect the presence of the enterprise

with the contact center, something vendors have been touting as a benefit of plain old UC for several years.

The University of Alabama case study is simply an example of proactive contact, a technology contact center vendors have

been plugging for several years. Avaya, for its part, points to two routing 2.0 benefits in its marketing collateral publicizing

the deployment:

• The solution ‘enables faster linkages of people, processes and resources by allowing patients to manage their

requests quickly independently and confidentially.’

• The deployment ‘results in more agile, secure and reliable operations by enabling customers to guide the self-

service process and to execute their payments securely and confidentially.’

Customer Impact



Those two points are the key. Routing 2.0 may actually be a new category of technologies or deploying existing older

technologies in new ways or simply the status quo. For those involved in the horse race aspects of the technology industry,

those who care which vendor has gained some market share or which have backed a fading standard, the actual validity of

the labels may matter. But for customers, what seems most important is vendors are now focusing on providing solutions

that focus on improving agility and speed, foster collaboration and understand that communications technology is deployed

in the service of completing specific business processes.

Competitive Landscape



COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Enterprise communications and contact center infrastructure providers have adopted diverse terminology to describe their

take on the need for and approach to the routing 2.0 issue. As mentioned previously, the number of acronyms coming from

the vendor community has been piling up faster than snow from a winter blizzard, some similar enough sounding to ensure

confusion among potential customers (CEBP versus CBPA or iWD versus IPA, anyone?) and some dissimilar. Despite this

ball of confusion waiting to form, Datamonitor believes that the underlying approaches from all of these vendors have many

more commonalities than distinct differences.

Datamonitor does not claim that all these possible solutions sets are functionally or conceptually the same; some of the

differences between vendors are indeed substantive. These differences often arise from different corporate and

technological histories. Contact center technology vendors that traditionally focused on building customer interaction

solutions for smaller companies have a different perspective from large enterprise communications vendors that have also

sold contact center solutions atop their traditional switches. Those differences clearly inform the problems they are trying

solve with these new routing 2.0 solutions.

Many of the differences between the vendors, however, are little more than mere window dressing. Some vendors choose

a new way to position existing technologies to best highlight their traditional strengths. This should not be confused for a

startlingly new solution. In addition, some vendors choose new terminologies simply for standard competitive positioning.

When the goal is to remove human latency from a specific process, does it matter whether it is called CEBP or BPR or

CBPA? All of these providers are trying to assist their customers with core issues of process efficiency, whether through

automated triggers that move those processes along, or collaborative technologies that aim to map traditional contact

center routing concepts to a broader enterprise paradigm.

Given that Datamonitor believes that the market for routing 2.0 has just started to show glimmers of life, competition for

CEBP-specific deals seems minimal. Or, more accurately, the competition for those deals is often not predicated on a

routing 2.0-specific technology. At the moment, enterprise communications and contact center infrastructure vendors are

primarily selling to the same set of key decision makers within enterprises as they have traditionally done, and typically to

the same companies that make up their installed base. When the deals involve net new customers, the routing 2.0 piece of

the deal is often an additional improvement offered as part of the broader communications or contact center solution.

However, as acceptance of routing 2.0 concepts become more mainstream and enterprises begin to look at technology

enabling more critical processes, the key decision makers will change and are more likely to be drawn from the ranks of the

C-level executives. At that point, competition for new customers will likely heat up and the routing 2.0 messaging and

technology can play roles as differentiators.

It is also extremely important for enterprises to understand their own needs, or to find a trusted partner to help identify

those needs, and then find the appropriate technology to match. The best match may actually come from superior

technology, but it is more likely to come from working with a technology provider that either understands the specific vertical

or horizontal processes or one that has the appropriate partners with that deep level of understanding. Because routing 2.0

implementations tend to have a heavy professional services component, vendors that bring their services expertise or who

have partners with that expertise will also have an advantage.




What follows are short profiles of several leading technology providers, all with a history in the contact center space,

focusing on their approach to the routing 2.0 issue and on any specific products or services that are part of an explicit

routing 2.0 solution. Particular attention has been paid to vendors that have created their own nomenclature for either their

routing 2.0 strategy or for a particular product (or product set) that would fall under the routing 2.0 heading as defined by

Datamonitor.

Communications technology providers

Aspect Software

Aspect Software has been a company undergoing a transition in both outlooks on and approaches to the enterprise market.

The company had previously focused its efforts primarily on the contact center, through both its well-known outbound and

inbound contact routing tools as well as its highly-regarded workforce optimization technologies (WOTs). But over the past

year, Aspect has begun to refocus its approach, organizing itself under the unified communications (UC) banner and

capitalizing on an increasingly close partnership with Microsoft.

That partnership has been redefining Aspect’s messaging and has helped Aspect look beyond the bounds of the contact

center, recognizing that many contacts that go into the contact center then leave the contact center. Since having that

contact leave the confines of the contact center means that most enterprises lose the ability to track those contacts, to

figure out whether the customer issue has been resolved, and the ability to report and manage the processes, there is an

opportunity for a UC solution to fill those gaps.

Aspect has not created a specific solution called CEBP; rather it sees CEBP as an approach that its UC applications can

help create and foster within enterprises. Currently, Aspect sees that most enterprises have a wide array of different

processes in which there are latencies that can be removed, and the processes thus improved. The understanding of how

to apply this type of process improvement across a broad business spectrum is just dawning; Aspect recognizes that it has

an education effort ahead of it. It must help raise understanding of what UC is and what it is capable of within the contact

center. Aspect must also then help the contact centers connect the dots with the broader enterprise.

But, unlike many of its rivals, Aspect also clearly sees the value in small, incremental improvements to processes. Given

the inherently conservative nature of contact centers, Aspect has taken a wise approach by seeing that not every process

improvement needs to hit a home run and completely reshape the business. Basic notifications, for example, are

technologies that Aspect believes have not been used effectively to date but could be used much more effectively for

smaller improvements.

One Aspect executive used an analogy to describe the efficiency improvements afforded to enterprises by CEBP: "‘Say I

build furniture as a hobby. I used to drive my nails in with a hammer; now we have a pneumatic nail gun. People have just

found a better hammer. I can dramatically accelerate doing the tasks that I already do." However, Aspect believes that the

key to true value enhancement is not focusing solely on efficiency for efficiency’s sake. To extend that executive’s analogy

one step further, CEBP is not about driving more nails per minute, it is about thinking about how many more pieces of

furniture per day one can build.

To help it succeed in such endeavors, including its transition to UC applications, Aspect realized that it also needed to bring

a different team to the playing field and refashion its salesforce into one that could credibly sell solutions. Unlike its




traditional salesforce that saw contact center opportunities at every turn, Aspect needed a sales team capable of identifying

UC and routing 2.0 opportunities distinct from the contact center. That transition was started in earnest in early 2009.

The transition can be seen as having three stages:

• Having a sales team that talks to executives in charge of the contact center and can sell the benefits of UC

in that environment.

• Having a sales team that also talks to IT organizations and helps the broader business under their

auspices.

• Having a sales team that can successfully make solution-based sales pitches to executives in charge of

broad business processes.

Although that final stage is still a ways off, Aspect has been building out the technological infrastructure to create solutions

that will resonate with these new target buyers. For example, its UC applications are now delivered on a Microsoft .Net

Web services platform that consolidates all customer contact and workforce optimization capabilities for the contact center

into a single standards-based software solution. This centralized approach directly tackles some of IT’s biggest concerns

about proprietary technology silos.

Avaya

Without a doubt, Avaya has been a thought leader in the Routing 2.0 world. The market share leader in the contact center

infrastructure world, Avaya has been working for several years to educate its customers on the benefits of extending

customer service interactions beyond the confines of contact centers. It has also been the most visible flag waver in both

the contact center and enterprise communications domains for the CEBP concept over that same time period. In fact, the

company’s first press release focused on CEBP was issued in early 2007, and even back then the company had solid case

studies, including one from longtime customer service innovator Whirlpool, to document the ways that its technologies were

used to improve enterprise efficiency.

Avaya based its CEBP approach around a simple to grasp concept: reducing human latency within corporate processes

provides a large boost in that organization’s ability to become more agile and to manage risk. An unofficial but oft-repeated

Avaya tagline spells this out clearly: CEBP transforms enterprise business processes with Intelligent Communications. This

means that CEBP is about the optimization of enterprise workforce productivity, increasing business responsiveness and

improving customer service.

Avaya views CEBP as the convergence of open standard technologies and methodologies from the IT and communication

worlds, including session initiation protocol (SIP), service-oriented architecture (SOA), and event processing:

communication assets most enterprises already have in place. It integrates those communications technologies with critical

business processes and applications. Avaya’s CEBP technologies then act as a hub for orchestrating real-time

communication, available for use by any business process through a single web service integration point.

On the product and services front, the Avaya CEBP solution set consists of the Event Processor, Communications Process

Manager software, consulting, custom software integration, and support services. This flexible collection of products and

services allows Avaya to create CEBP solutions tailored to a widely divergent range of business processes. The key is that,

with CEBP, business processes are automated to detect key relevant events that require human participation, and then




respond by tracking down the appropriate decision makers. Avaya’s CEBP solutions can utilize any available

communication channel to create the connection between workers, and also to provide relevant and actionable information

on which those workers can act.

Avaya offers a full complement of CEBP-related consulting services, including a full ROI-based analysis. The company’s

services division has the vertical expertise to run a process assessment, identify which processes would most benefit most

from communications enablement, and define tangible measurements for tracking benefits.

The Avaya Event Processor, when integrated into a business process, allows an enterprise to constantly monitor numerous

systems and to detect business-rules defined triggers. These triggers could be specific events or out-of-the-ordinary

patterns or events, essentially boundary exceptions. When such an event is detected, the Event Processor kicks off an alert

process through the Avaya Communications Process Manager.

The Communications Process Manager provides alerts, notification and conferencing and collaboration opportunities, either

defined by the Event Processor or generated by another business application. Enterprises can respond to these events by

connecting the relevant parties through essentially any communications channel, such as phone (either desk or mobile),

email, chat or SMS.

Avaya has also crafted a CEBP-like approach to its proactive contact technologies. As an example of how outbound dialing

can be wed to business processes, Avaya uses a healthcare case. A radiologist service allows its patients to sign up for

their annual checkup reminder. Each annual ‘event’ triggers an automated notification to the patient’s phone. The reminder

incorporates a self-service feature that allows the patient to immediately schedule their annual checkup. Since the system

has the basic patient information, it is a fast and painless process to schedule the appointment, thus resulting in a very

satisfied patient. From the provider’s perspective, the entire transaction can be completely automated, reducing internal

resource costs, and ensuring maximum schedule utilization. This melding of traditional contact center responsibility with

process automation results in both increased effectiveness and in lower costs, both obviously major customer concerns in

the current economic climate.

At one point, Avaya had a distinct business unit focused solely on CEBP. As part of the company’s ambitious plan to

reorganize and simplify its formerly unwieldy structure, that organization has been distributed within the company. Some of

the company’s rivals have pointed to this move as a sign that Avaya’s commitment to, and understanding of, CEBP was

never very strong. Datamonitor strongly disagrees with that assessment: as CEBP assists a wide variety of vertical and

horizontal processes across enterprises, Avaya is better served by having CEBP know-how distributed throughout the

company’s various teams.

Cisco

Cisco focuses its routing 2.0 efforts on the collaboration made possible by communications technology. It has coined the

concept of collaboration enabled business transformation (CEBT) to describe its solutions-driven approach to inserting

collaboration into enterprise business processes.

Cisco defines CEBT as embedding communications and collaborations into the business fabric and environment of the

enterprise, enabling the enterprise to achieve its strategic goals and priorities. CEBT involves communications embedded

into the business processes and applications, enabling these applications and processes to automatically or otherwise




invoke collaboration within the context of the process flow or operations environment. This achieves the goal of connecting

the decision makers with the business event and with each other to drive faster decision. Here communications and

collaboration are used as a strategic tool to increase business value in the enterprise by driving operational efficiencies.

The problem statement as Cisco sees it is that enterprises are fundamentally moving their goalposts: the value propositions

that used to drive communications adoption, such as an improved total cost of ownership (TCO) through IP adoption, no

longer get enterprises excited. Enterprises are now looking to drive increased productivity, not just contact center agent

productivity, but enterprise worker productivity. CEBT provides the driver for that improved productivity. And the time to

value has been dramatically improved. Cisco executives point out that creating and implementing computer-telephony

integrations took ages, while collaboration-enabling business processes can be accomplished in as little as a few weeks,

depending on complexity.

Cisco sees a three phase evolution of CEBT-like technological adoption.

• In the first phase, an enterprise focuses on employee productivity, a horizontal approach that covers all roles

across the entire enterprise. Much of the productivity gains in phase one will be driven by adoption of specific

point products, including unified messaging clients and other communications products that improve worker

efficiency.

• The second phase will focus on a broader business transformation, including vertical and process-specific

issues, and will be driven by solutions. Cisco’s financial services-targeted Virtual Expert solution provides a good

case study of this type of transformative solution. Cisco’s Virtual Expert Management solution was designed to

assure expertise for all financial products at all branches in a retail financial services environment. When

customers seeking information about loans or investment products cannot be served by branch personnel, the

customers can be quickly connected to an appropriate financial expert via two-way video, regardless of where

that expert is located within the organization.

• The third phase, as envisioned by Cisco, sees enterprises returning to a horizontal focus and aiming to optimize

all of their processes. This likely includes integration of the horizontal communications technologies with

enterprise applications, both horizontal and vertical.

To provide customers with CEBT solutions driven by the appropriate vertical and horizontal expertise, Cisco has begun to

significantly build out its ecosystem. Cisco has been recruiting partners that can bring the application knowledge to

complement its collaboration and communications expertise. As an example, Cisco points to its partnership with business

consulting and strategic IT services giant Infosys. That partnership saw Infosys taking Cisco’s Virtual Experts solution for

banking and embedding it into Infosys’ financial applications, providing customers with a broad solution that neither

technology company could provide on their own.

Genesys

Unlike many of the other vendors in this report, Genesys (an Alcatel-Lucent company) has been focused almost exclusively

on providing technology that drives customer service and support functions. But Genesys has recently begun to branch out

into the broader enterprise. However, unlike communications infrastructure providers that have built loose solution sets

around CEBP and CEBP-like concepts, Genesys has centered its attention on a specific new product called intelligent




Workload Distribution (iWD). That product is partially based on technology acquired as part of the company’s acquisition of

Conseros in early 2009 and continues the theme of business process routing (BPR) that Genesys had been using in its

messaging for several quarters before that. iWD was designed to take the best practices created for automating the

prioritization and distribution of tasks to the best skilled resource in the contact center, and apply to them to routing work

items to non-contact center employees.

Genesys sees distinct but related pain points in the contact center and the enterprise. In the contact center, customer

service executives are driven by concerns around the efficiency of their operations and focused on the various contact

channels, including phone, web, chat, etc. In the enterprise, where processes such as application processing are the key

drivers, executives face an environment in which there is no easy way to differentiate those tasks based on the customer or

the value of the task. High-value tasks, which should be completed first, stay in a work queue for longer than they should.

Additionally, executives lack visibility into these processes and are unable to track the progress of the processes.

Genesys designed iWD to solve these challenges with a single solution to integrate resources, contact center capabilities,

and internal business processes to ensure the right resources proactively receive the highest value tasks at the right time,

regardless of location or media type.

Figure 5: Genesys iWD architecture

Source: Genesys D A T A M O N I T O R




As shown in Figure 5, iWD is built on top of Genesys’ core routing and contact distribution technology, the Customer

Interaction Management (CIM) platform. The figure illustrates the basic architecture of the solution, detailing how iWD

improves business efficiency and customer service with real-time prioritization of tasks and interactions from a broad range

of enterprise work sources. It then dynamically manages and distributes tasks based on their business value to a

consolidated pool of available resources across the entire organization. iWD can also prioritize and route work items from

existing enterprise software applications such as ERP, BPM, and CRM.

The iWD solution has three main feature areas:

• Capture – the solution captures ‘tasks’ from multiple enterprise work sources, such as a claims

administration system. It does this through out-of-the-box Capture Adapters designed for rapid integration

with third-party systems.

• Calculate – users define business service level agreements (SLAs) using business rules (DSL initiation for

a gold-level customer always takes priority over an address change for a bronze-level customer, but within

five days of a billing cycle, the address change will be reprioritized to become the top task). It also

automatically monitors tasks against SLAs and adjusts to ensure SLA adherence.

• Distribute – leveraging the resource and skill awareness in Genesys CIM, the solution proactively assigns

work to the best resource.

Genesys has crafted a go-to-market strategy that capitalizes on its tight relationships with heads of customer care/customer

service that have responsibility for the contact center, and using those contacts to identifying those line-of-business

executives that control back office processes. Genesys will work with those executives to pinpoint issues with processes

that ultimately lead to sub-optimal customer service and customers calling back into the contact center. Genesys has also

begun to leverage partners such as IBM to jointly tap into specific vertical markets, such as opportunities in the insurance

space.

Interactive Intelligence

Due to the combination of its relatively small size and SME customer base and its expansive plans to create an entirely

new revenue stream for itself, Interactive Intelligence may have the most ambitious routing 2.0 strategy of any of the

companies mentioned in this report. The company, with a run rate of around $600m, has been a mainstay of small and

midsized contact centers, providing a compelling business case for its all-in-one contact center offering, the Customer

Interaction Center (CIC). However, Interactive Intelligence saw that its customers had more on their minds than simply

cutting costs through an all-in-one solution. Its customers were looking for ways to automate manual processes filled with

human latency and human error, as a way to create tangible ROI benefits.

The company started developing a process automation engine, but felt that what it was creating did not fall under any of the

other categories floating around the market, other than UC in a loose sense. However, company executives explain that UC

has been so over-marketed and so misunderstood, that if it jumped on the UC bandwagon, its efforts would get lost in all

the noise. In particular, Interactive Intelligence differentiates its new concept, called communications based process

automation (CBPA), from CEBP. The reasoning for this distinction is that Interactive Intelligence claims that CEBP is really

nothing more than allowing applications to use communications systems to kick off notifications; for example, if a

customer’s database record indicates a balance due greater than a defined threshold, CEBP can generate a phone call.




The company, however, wants to go beyond enabling existing processes (or applications) to generate phone calls or e-

mails when something interesting happens. Its idea of CBPA centers on how enterprises automate processes in the first

place.

The salient point behind CBPA is to utilize long established and well understood communications concepts that have been

in use for decades as the foundation for the process automation. In essence, the company wants to take all the ideas that

have been born in the contact center and use them in process automation. Contact centers have long leveraged concepts

such as queuing, skills-based routing, presence, recording and real-time supervision in order to automate the process of

handling large volumes of customer contacts. These technologies allow enterprises to dynamically reorganize queues to

bump the most valuable customers to the front of the line. Supervisors can listen in on calls and coach agents. Calls can be

recorded automatically if they meet certain defined conditions. CBPA aims to apply those types of technologies to process

automation.

Interactive Intelligence’s CBPA offering will be called Interaction Process Automation (IPA), which will be formally

introduced in the summer of 2009 and will become generally available by the end of the year. IPA is the tool by which those

contact center concepts get applied to general business processes:

• Contact center-style queuing and routing provide accurate and flexible distribution of multi-step workflow

processes.

• Presence becomes ‘process presence’, indicating availability for a work assignment to speed processing time.

• Recording becomes an essential part of compliance for business processes.

• Real-time supervisory monitoring provides visibility into every step of the work process including supervisory,

audit, and reporting functions.

As shown in Figure 6, the same IPA process can be kicked off in numerous manners. Automated events generated in other

systems can be the trigger, as can traditional contact center self-service channels such as email or IVR. Contact center

agents can also kick off processes on behalf of customers from within CIC.

At heart, IPA can be seen as an orchestration system; enterprises model and design the end-to-end process in the tool, but

perform the actual work steps in other systems. Initially, the company plans to sell IPA as an add-on module to its all-in-one

CIC deals, so its initial target customers are exclusively the same customers that buy the contact center products. As the

product develops, Interactive Intelligence envisions scenarios in which IPA eventually becomes be a driver to new

customers, and pushes those customers towards CIC deals. The company's ambitious end game vision also sees IPA as a

standalone deal, sold to customers that do not use CIC as their contact center platform.

The company has also begun to reformulate its channel strategy to better position the IPA offering. Interactive Intelligence

has partnered with RWD Technologies, a provider of human and operational performance improvement solutions. RWD

has become the first CBPA process consulting partner. RWD will provide customers looking to deploy IPA with change

management expertise and help coordinate between all the various stakeholders. In another ambitious plan, Interactive

Intelligence expects that many of its larger existing partners will also start to build out their own process change consulting

business, giving the company scale for spreading its CBPA vision. Because the company sells its products through a




network of more than 300 partners, uptake of the IPA product by those channel partners will be crucial to Interactive

Intelligence’s long-term success with CBPA.

Figure 6: Numerous interactions can initiate the same IPA process

Source: Interactive Intelligence D A T A M O N I T O R

NEC

NEC believes in the CEBP message, but it has a somewhat unique spin. The company sees two distinct flavors of CEBP:

one focused on collaboration and one focused on transactions. The collaboration-oriented CEBP would be cases in which

humans use UC technologies to find and collaborate with humans in the context of business process. The transaction-

oriented CEBP would be akin to process communications on demand, in essence cases where applications find and

interact with humans in order to advance business processes. The company creates solutions for both types of CEBP but

has team leads that specialize in each variant.




The company calls its CEBP approach Unified Business and has a three-tier technology stack to create the automation for

any given business process. At the base of the stack is a unified infrastructure, including data centers, the network and

personal communications equipment such as desktop computers and IP endpoints. In the middle tier of the stack sit unified

UC technologies and the desktop integration of those technologies. The top of the stack is the process layer, including

unified processes such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, and operations and inventory

management. A stack in the healthcare realm could then be made up of a wireless infrastructure, web collaboration and

patient records updating processes, or a VoIP infrastructure, instant messaging and a patient discharge process.

NEC also sees opportunities for CEBP in more horizontal processes. Some examples of these horizontal processes include

password reset in the IT realms and appointment scheduling and reminder process in the customer service world. Human

resources processes such as timesheet management and security processes such as emergency management could also

benefit from a CEBP approach.

NEC realized that it needs partners to help with specific vertical and horizontal application expertise. The company has

begun working with an as yet unnamed partner to integrate communications into enterprise applications, essentially

creating productized integrations to make CEBP more of a repeatable sale.

Nortel

Nortel aligns itself with the CEBP nomenclature. In 2008, the company occasionally talked about communications-enabled

applications, but that terminology seemed to exclude process and it has turned its attention fully to CEBP solutions. The

company has created an internal organization called Communications-Enabled Business Solutions to address the CEBP

opportunity.

In Nortel’s eyes, CEBP is an element of UC that integrates all communications into employee desktops and mobile users

and into key business processes. That definition is intentionally broad because the opportunities to improve processes

inside enterprises are extremely broad.

That said, the company believes the market for CEBP is absolutely nascent. A Nortel executive told Datamonitor that the

company sees IP transformation as being on the main stage of enterprise attention. UC is still new enough that companies

are only just starting to get their heads around it. CEBP is still seen as way out there; only companies that see that process

transformation as a strategic part of their business are currently adopting it.

However, given Nortel’s expansive view of what constitutes CEBP, the company has several solid case studies of CEBP

deployments. One case study involves a large health care provider that was, understandably enough, looking for ways to

improve patient care. The healthcare provider wanted to improve the speed with which they could deliver X-rays and

reduce the time to diagnosis. This hospital has an extremely large campus and mobilizing their complement of radiology

technicians removed a large chunk of latency. The technicians used to have to return to a central site on campus to be

assigned their next work task. Nortel technology now uses presence and location information to electronically route work

tasks to the best located and available technician. Patient wait time for radiological services has been decreased and

diagnosis times have been shortened.

In that healthcare situation, as with many CEBP deals, the customer did not come into the RFP process looking to

automate what was eventually automated. Because CEBP solutions are so new, Nortel says that many customers do not




even realize what is possible with the technology. CEBP, therefore, is not often an intuitive sale; it requires a consultative

approach and the actual deployments tend to have a larger services component than a standard UC implementation.

Siemens

Although Siemens has discussed the CEBP concept with press, analysts and clients, it takes an interesting tack and

concentrates much of its messaging in the area on its service-oriented architecture (SOA). While other vendors have SOA-

related themes under the CEBP heading, Siemens claims much of its differentiation from its SOA approach. On the contact

center side, the company has worked closely with CRM providers to communications-enable their applications. This means

embedding agent controls and presence into applications such as SAP’s and Microsoft’s CRM offerings, as well as the

Siebel Call Center offering.

Siemens’s idea of the definition of CEBP does not differ radically from that of its competitors: embedding enterprise

communications concepts and technologies into horizontal, user productivity applications or business process applications,

in general. But Siemens does focus on the ways in which CEBP can be improved through an open SOA approach to

applications.

In Siemens’ world view, the enterprise environment today is dominated by independent applications that operate in silos,

linked together by expensive and time-consuming ‘one-off’ integrations. That leads to duplicated functionality and expense,

as well as the need for extensive testing which adds more delay and cost to the process. Siemens’ SOA approach aims to

create re-usable software components delivering dedicated services functions. These components can then be neatly

integrated into composite SOA applications, snapped together like LEGO pieces.. This would result in applications that are

more adaptable and which can be implemented more rapidly. If the communications technology was yet another

component that could be snapped into the composite, the routing 2.0 functionality will be easier to create.

Figure 7 shows an example of an application, created by Siemens’ medical division, that incorporates unified

communications elements into workflow and vertical-specific processes. From within the single screen displayed, a medical

worker can initiate real-time conferencing, access corporate email systems (Microsoft Outlook, in this example), understand

colleagues’ presence status and collaborate with them via document sharing and tap into domain-specific applications with

their familiar interface.




Figure 7: Siemens integrates unified communications with workflow

Source: Siemens D A T A M O N I T O R

Business process management vendors

At least superficially, a lot of the messaging around the various routing 2.0 technologies resembles the messaging around

business process management (BPM) applications suites provided by vendors such as Lombardi Software, IBM, Savvion

and Intalio. BPM suites help enterprises model their existing processes, as well as design, model and execute new

technology-assisted business processes. Therefore, both routing 2.0 technologies and BPM claim to help improve and

optimize business processes.

While some of the vendors profiled above foresee a day when their offerings might put them in competition (or at least in

perceived competition) with the BPM software vendors, this is a minority opinion. In the main, then, BPM providers could

become close partners of routing 2.0 vendors, and this area of partnership is one that routing 2.0 providers should be

exploring sooner rather than later. In the cases where routing 2.0 vendors work closely with services partners, it could be

those services partners that own the partnership with BPM suite vendors. This, in fact, is already happening: the leading

professional services providers already have relationships with the BPM providers and some even have full-fledged

practices built around the application suites.

The idea behind the potential partnerships between the communications infrastructure providers and the BPM providers is

fairly simple. BPM suites fundamentally lack communications middleware and the routing 2.0 vendors would provide that




piece of the solution, essentially inserting communication flows into the BPM applications. In simpler terms, the CEBP and

CBPA solutions, among others, would monitor the BPM systems, pull relevant events out of the BPM flow and act on them.

Comparison of various nomenclatures

As a reference, Table 1 indicates all of the various categories and product names that the vendors mentioned above use to

describe their routing 2.0 products and services. Additionally, the table maps those vendors to Datamonitor’s categories as

shown in Figure 3. As none of these categories are precisely defined, these categories are only a rough fit, but useful for

comparison purposes.

Table 1: Vendor-identified routing 2.0 categories

Vendor Vendor Identified Category New Product Datamonitor Categories

Aspect Software Communications-enabled Business Processes

Collaboration-oriented CEBP; Transaction-oriented CEBP; UC in the contact center

Avaya Communications-enabled Business Processes


Cisco Collaboration-enabled Business Transformation

Collaboration-oriented CEBP; UC in the contact center

Genesys Service Delivery Optimization

Intelligent Workload Distribution Business Process Routing

Interactive Intelligence Communications-based Process Automation

Interaction Process Automation Business Process Routing

NEC Communications-enabled Business Processes

Transaction-oriented CEBP; UC in the contact center

Nortel Communications-enabled Business Processes


Siemens Communications-enabled Business Processes



Go to Market



GO TO MARKET

Due to the lack of clear definition of the space, the market for routing 2.0 technologies has no clear shape or outlines.

Customers looking for incremental improvements in their outbound communications efforts, for example, may find

themselves having conversations with competing technology vendors that seem unrelated. One vendor might be talking

about mapping out business processes and injecting communications technology into those processes to remove human

error or human latency; another vendor might be discussing the benefits of a predictive dialer solution. The lack of definition

may not impact the efficacy of any of the technologies, but it does make the situation much more confusing for potential

customers.

That said, because there are business processes that cross the back office and the contact center in essentially every

industry that has sizable contact centers, vendor opportunities remain quite broad. Industries with larger contact center

operations and larger back-office operations will make the most obvious initial targets for vendors. As exemplified by the

Siam Commercial Bank deployment detailed above, the financial services industry has the ideal combination of high

volume contact centers and complex processes that require back office involvement to be an obvious target market.

Processes ranging from loan origination to selection between complex portfolios of products to credit fulfillment all seem

prime opportunities for the routing 2.0-type of automation.

There are some interesting vertical opportunities for vendors outside of their usual contact center target markets. The

healthcare industry has become a more significant target market for contact center vendors. According to Datamonitor’s

forecasts, in 2008 7.3% of all in-house agent positions globally were in the healthcare field. In North America, one of the

prime geographies for routing 2.0 technologies, that figure climbs to 8.8%. That figure is far smaller than the totals for

financial services and the communications verticals. Healthcare, however, has numerous processes that suffer from

significant degrees of human latency, such as patient discharge, patient-staff communications, and dispatch of technicians

over large campuses. Those areas have already been targeted by routing 2.0 solutions from numerous vendors, but those

processes often do not include the contact center and it is in processes that include outbound contacts such as collections

or appointment reminders in which the healthcare vertical shows particular promise.

Another potentially interesting vertical target market for routing 2.0 will be the public sector and higher education. Both

verticals have need for truly robust emergency response systems. Given that routing 2.0 systems often use triggers to

initiate some action (person-to-person communication, system-to-person communications, system-to-system

communications), this need for both efficient and effective notification systems in the public sector spells opportunity for

technology vendors. Additionally, the public sector has some process notoriously fraught with human latency. It would be

hard to come up with examples of more widely loathed customer-to-enterprise interactions than any process involving a

department of motor vehicles or some claims process involving some public assistance or public benefits programs.

Improving these processes can not only improve the bottom line, but also better the citizen-government relationship.

Vendors who hope to capitalize on these vertical-specific opportunities will obviously need to marshal resources, either in-

house or through partners, with specific vertical expertise. It will not be enough to understand the communications

technologies; for example, vendors will need to understand how universities run their campus’ physical security, including

what surveillance and threat assessment processes look like or how the transportation industry handles its crash control,

recovery and response processes. This level of vertical expertise requires deeper business-oriented consulting capabilities.

Go to Market



Education, education, education

At a recent event for industry analysts, one of the leading vendors of contact center and communications technology for

mid-sized companies held a panel discussion with three of the company’s value added resellers (VARs). One of the

analysts in attendance asked the VARs about their progress with CEBP and their customers’ overall interest level in CEBP.

The question was met with blank stares. It was simply not a term the VARs used or one that they had heard from their

customers. Although anecdotal evidence such as this should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, technology vendors

clearly have a long way to go in raising awareness of these technologies, their uses and their benefits. Until that awareness

is raised, someone is likely to have to tell customers that they are using a CEBP solution.

The lack of common nomenclature obviously does not help the situation. But the lack of a single routing 2.0 identity also

does more than create confusion, as it clearly indicates that most of the vendors hoping to capitalize on this space are

doing so on their own. Routing 2.0 does include integrations with non-communications applications such as CRM, ERP,

manufacturing and payments processing systems, but that is more about integration with non-adjacent technologies than it

is about interoperability among peer systems. As customers attempt to meld communications and process in ever more

complex ways, the need for heterogeneous interoperability will become more critical for customer success.

Recommendations

Although Datamonitor believes that routing 2.0 technology adoption has not really hit an inflection point towards widespread

acceptance, customers have started to look for the types of benefits that these solutions can provide. Vendors therefore

need to do more than rebrand, repackage and remarket technology. What follows are four core recommendations for

technology providers hoping to create a sizable business in this routing 2.0 world.

Less focus on names, more focus on benefits

This research has devoted a great deal of attention to the names that vendors use for this category of technology. This

level of attention simply reflects the degree to which vendors lavish attention of differentiation through naming. Continuation

of this trend will only engender confusion among potential customers. As suggested by the lack of awareness of the term

CEBP among VARs that create contact center and enterprise communications solutions, the current model of splitting hairs

among minor differences in approach has not helped the vendors’ cause any. Therefore, Datamonitor believes that vendors

need to place less emphasis on the marketing-driven distinctions that have been the hallmark of routing 2.0 to date and

focus much more on potential benefits in their discussions with prospects.

Given the current economic environment and the dominance of ROI calculations in enterprise decision making, vendors

would also do well to refocus their marketing onto case studies that show rapid, but incremental, benefits. The University of

Alabama case study highlighted in this research is so compelling because the technology helped automate something akin

to micro-payments. A case study that shows an organization with a pool money that was essentially written off that turned

into $600,000 per year in revenue enhancement while also reducing staffing levels will get prospects attention, even in a

recessionary environment.

Go to Market



Build business consulting partnerships

The deeply vertical nature of many of the processes that routing 2.0 tries to handle makes it clear that vendors must supply

resources that truly understand industry-specific practices. Some of those resources, particularly the technology and

integration consultants, can come from within the vendor’s own organizations. In fact, for account management purposes, it

often helps for vendors to provide a point person for vertically-focused technology issues, even if much of the integration

work is being performed by integration partners.

However, because routing 2.0 deals with identifying, improving and automating business processes, customers will likely

require help with the process and business change issues and those issues are not, and should not be, horizontal

technology vendors’ strong suit. Therefore, routing 2.0 vendors need to expand their channel program to include vendors

with vertically-oriented process experience, as well as general process and business change management consulting

experience.

This channel expansion, however, is critical for more than just gaining vertical process experience. As mentioned numerous

times in the preceding pages, routing 2.0 requires a qualitatively different conversation between vendor and prospect, often

done at levels in the organization at which the vendor may not have much familiarity. Because the business consultancies

tend to build their relationships with the occupants of the C-suite inside their customers’ organizations, these companies

can also help facilitate introductions and raise awareness for the technology vendors. Interactive Intelligence’s new

partnership with a business consulting specialist shows one model for how these relationships might look, but for any

vendor to have a scalable sales effort, it will take numerous partners across numerous regions to provide a myriad of non-

technical services.

Target the horizontal

This research presented numerous examples of industry-specific business process to which routing 2.0 technology can be

applied. Again, this reflects much of the vendors’ marketing efforts and existing case studies. Nevertheless , the routing 2.0

family of technologies can be just as easily applied to horizontal processes. Those processes tend to not directly involve

customer interactions and so fall outside the purview of this report. However, vendors should also look towards facilitating

and automating processes such as termination processes for human resources. Gaps in that process due to human

latency, for example, can compromise an organization’s security and reputation. It is, therefore, ripe for automation via

routing 2.0. Similarly important processes exist in the internal help desk, sales organization, marketing departments, IT

organizations and back-office functions such as finance or legal. One of the great advantages of these horizontal processes

is that they can be sold via a horizontal salesforce and do not require specific overlay organizations. They also have the

advantages of numbers: every large company has a human resources department that must deal with the process of

collecting equipment and closing down access for employees leaving the company. As these processes are close to

universal, there is a much wider breadth of opportunity.

Focus on true interoperability

Although it is somewhat of a false dichotomy, technology vendors often debate the single supplier versus the best-of-breed

approach. Enterprises usually claim to want their vendors to create more interoperability in their products, so they can

reduce their dependence on a single technology supplier and so they can assemble those best-of-breed solutions. Of

course, having multiple vendors in a single project presents difficulties for customers, as problem resolution becomes tricky

Go to Market



without a single point company, integration problems and costs tend to escalate beyond what was planned for, and training

becomes more difficult with multiple systems and multiple interfaces. Enterprise communications technology providers

understand these problems and often capitalize on them as the reasoning behind creating less-than-stellar interoperability.

Routing 2.0, with its emphasis on UC, seems like it should be a haven for interoperability. To date, this has not been the

case. UC technology vendors have put a solid effort into integrations between their technologies and non-competing

systems. A switch vendor ensures that the switch can work with an IBM Domino server, for example. But true peer-to-peer

interoperability lags far behind.

Since routing 2.0 should be able to automate processes that not only jump across internal organizations but also different

internal technology stacks, that type of peer-to-peer interoperability would make the solutions significantly more robust.

While Datamonitor recognizes that a vendor wants to own as much wallet share as possible, building solutions that match

the flow of business processes will often require playing nicely with technology from directly competing vendors. To see

how interoperability makes process flow easier, one need look no further than numerous email systems in use today. A

Lotus Notes user can easily send emails to a Microsoft Exchange user and can seamlessly receive email from a Google

Gmail account. That level of seamless interoperability has allowed modern business to take the shape it has. That level of

interoperability, therefore, should be the goal of any vendor with designs on the routing 2.0 market.

Appendix



APPENDIX

Definitions • Contact center – Datamonitor defines a contact center by the following features: an automatic call distributor

(ACD) or private branch exchange (PBX) with equivalent functionality overlaid (or soft ACD) that has 10 or more

agent positions (desks from which agents make and/or receive telephone calls to and/or from internal or external

customers). This is taken to imply that the call in question involves communication between the agent and the

customer.

• IP contact center – in its simplest definition, any contact center that does not use traditional circuit switching;

that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from PSTN to IP, usually through a media gateway. An IP

contact center leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either or both voice

and data communications can be efficiently routed to any agent with access to an IP connection. Through the

use of SIP, IP contact centers can detect and route customer communications based on SIP-controlled presence

management in place of the traditional automatic call director (ACD).

• IP-enabled – essentially an extension of an IP backbone that provides a private network providing IP services

for TDM locations.

• Session initiation protocol (SIP) – this is a signaling protocol, used for setting up and tearing down multimedia

communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the internet. SIP was accepted as a 3GPP signaling

protocol and permanent element of the IMS architecture for IP-based streaming multimedia services in cellular

systems.

• Knowledge management (KM) – this term is used to describe the tools that help organize and analyze

customer information. KM often includes data mining technologies and BI solutions that help to identify relevant

information from documents and historical and live data that flow through the contact center.

• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) – this term describes an architectural concept for enterprise IT that uses

loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network

in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of

their underlying platform implementation.

• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – a digital transmission technology for delivering telephone service using

the public internet, as well as private packet-switched networks or backbones, in lieu of the traditional telephone

network.

• Unified communications (UC) – the ability to manage all communications, whether it is voice, email, fax or

instant messaging, through one interface. It refers to the convergence of all related applications to enable a

seamless communication process and accessibility irrelevant of location or device. Technologies included are:

integrated personal directory, IP softphone, click-to-call, presence indicators, unified messaging, web (video and

audio) conferencing, one number.

• Unified messaging – applications that allow the user to receive voice-mail, email, SMS and fax in the same

place. Web conferencing includes video and audio conferencing over IP networks. This does not include

presence applications.

Appendix



Methodology • Primary research consisting of interviews with providers of enterprise communications technology, contact

center routing tools and unified communications services.

• Extensive secondary research drawing from the mainstream press, technology trade journals and academic

journal articles.

• Existing Datamonitor research on UC, contact center routing and other contact center technologies.

Further reading

Datamonitor (2009), The Recession in Vertical Perspective: North American and European Contact Center Technology

(Strategic Focus), May 2009, DMTC2301

Datamonitor (2009), Siam Commercial Bank Bridges the Contact Center and the Enterprise (Analyst Opinion), April 2009,

BFTC2334

Datamonitor (2009), The Rise of Outbound Applications in an Economic Recession (Strategic Focus), March 2009,

DMTC2272

Datamonitor (2009), Genesys Cements Course With Acquisitions Of SDE And Conseros (Analyst Opinion), February 2009,

BFTC2298

Datamonitor (2009), Genesys Clarifies UC Strategy (Analyst Opinion), February 2009, BFTC2306

Datamonitor (2008), 2009 Trends to Watch: Contact Center Markets and Technologies, December 2008, BFTC2238

Ask the analyst

The Technology Knowledge Center Writing team

Ian Jacobs, Senior Analyst, Customer Interaction Technologies, [email protected]

Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst, Customer Interaction Technologies, [email protected]

Datamonitor consulting

We hope that the data and analysis in this brief will help you make informed and imaginative business decisions. If you

have further requirements, Datamonitor’s consulting team may be able to help you. For more information about

Datamonitor’s consulting capabilities, please contact us directly at [email protected].

Disclaimer

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Datamonitor plc.

Appendix



The facts of this report are believed to be correct at the time of publication but cannot be guaranteed. Please note that the

findings, conclusions and recommendations that Datamonitor delivers will be based on information gathered in good faith

from both primary and secondary sources, whose accuracy we are not always in a position to guarantee. As such

Datamonitor can accept no liability whatever for actions taken based on any information that may subsequently prove to be

incorrect.

data monitor - routing 2.0 - cebp and bpr beyond the contact center - june 2009

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