Nortel Contact Center 7.0: Can You Say, Finally?Nortel Contact Center 7.0: Can You Say, Finally?

While Nortel is delivering a solid new release, with some great capabilities, it has taken almost four years.

Nortel this morning issued a press release announcing a new version of their contact center application, originally known as--and still referred to by many as--Symposium. A week ahead of what will likely be a rush of VoiceCon-related releases next week, it is nonetheless hard to get excited. Nortel has been pre-briefing customers and analysts on this release for almost two years. And even with all that waiting, it is not available yet. General availability is estimated to be mid to late June 2009.Nortel Contact Center 6.0 was released in November 2005. I have slides on my computer from the fall of 2006 that promised Nortel Contact Center 7.0 in 2007. I saw a demo of much of the announced capability (OCS integration and the new service creation environment capabilities) at a Nortel development lab in Galway in March 2007. A slide from September 2007 promised first quarter 2008. At Nortel's user group meeting in June 2008, attendees were told March 2009. And I really thought they were going to meet that date. Instead we get an announcement that it will be still another quarter.

OK, I'm over that. On to what has been announced. Tight integration with OCS 2007. Nicely done, directly into the Nortel Agent Desktop. But other vendors showed OCS integration to their contact center solutions years ago, e.g., Mitel.

A Service Creation Environment (SCE) for contact center and self-service workflow creation. "Nortel estimates use of this tool to be five times faster than traditional workflow creation methods." Well, since Nortel is the only major vendor that waited till 2009 to release a GUI design tool for their contact center application (Avaya, Genesys, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence, Siemens, etc. have had this for YEARS), the comparison they are likely making is to their own pre-release 7.0 methods. That said, it is cool that they are using one tool for both self and assisted service, something that today Interactive Intelligence has but others are just rolling out (Genesys, Siemens).

Another hyped capability is UC in the Contact Center, essentially the ability for agents to see the OCS presence of experts and "quickly determine which of their experts is available." In my opinion, other vendors have already taken this notion further--making sure that the choice of expert is not at an agent's discretion.

I could go on but I think I've made my point. While Nortel is delivering a solid new release, with some great capabilities, it is difficult to get excited when it has taken almost four years and so much of it is "other vendors do that better" or "they didn't have that already?!"While Nortel is delivering a solid new release, with some great capabilities, it has taken almost four years.