6/27/2005 -- Earlier this month, Cisco Systems Inc. announced new security, scalability and desktop application enhancements for its IP Contact Center (IPCC) and Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) customer contact center solutions.

Cisco IPCC and ICM Enterprise and Hosted 7.0 solutions feature new security, scalability and desktop applications, as well as improved modular deployment options. Cisco also announced a new IPCC Gateway that lets customers deploy and manage a single customer contact solution across the enterprise—or choose site-specific Cisco IPCC Enterprise and Cisco IPCC Express solutions that can be managed from a single ICM.

Also new is the Cisco Agent Desktop, an enterprise application integration wizard that Cisco says enables rapid, on-the-fly integration with Web-based CRM and other enterprise applications, without the need for custom development or developer support.

Perhaps of most interest to many customers is the new version 4.0 release of Cisco’s IPCC Express, which the company bills as a “contact center in a box.” Cisco hopes to market to small and medium-size businesses. It ships with high-end features like automatic failover and remote agent capabilities, and boasts automatic call distributor (ACD) features, such as conditional routing, call-in-queue and expected-wait-time messages, out-of-the-box computer telephony integration and integrated interactive voice response (IVR) services.

Joe Outlaw, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., sees the new contact center improvements as sort of a mixed bag for Cisco. For starters, he says, the enhancements do make Cisco more competitive in some markets, especially in the SMB space. “Increasing IPCC Express’ scalability from 200 to 300 [agents] will also open up market opportunities for Cisco to bid the less expensive Express solution both in growing SMBs and in larger mid-size centers in large enterprises,” Outlaw writes. “The addition of a high availability option for IPCC Express will also broaden Cisco’s target market segments to include companies whose contact centers are mission critical. At Express’ price points, it will be very competitive in these opportunities.”

There’s a downside to Cisco’s tinkering, too. “While the enhancements in 4.0 will broaden IPCC Express’ addressable market, it will also shrink IPCC Enterprises’ markets. The sweet spot to date for Enterprise has been in the 250 agent range, which will now be supportable by the less expensive Express product,” he notes. “Offering third-party PBX (via ICM integration) and a high availability option will further eat into Cisco’s IPCC Enterprise market opportunities. IPCC Enterprise release 4.0 did not, however, address the demand for thin or browser clients for agents, or provide any clearer migration path from Express to Enterprise.” -Stephen Swoyer