Contact Centres: View from Across the PondContact Centres: View from Across the Pond

While many of my US-based industry colleagues gather in Phoenix, AZ for the fifth Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) show, I headed east from NY instead of west. The tenth annual Call Centre Expo is being held at the same time in Birmingham, UK. So why, with snow too soon in my NY-based future, did I head for the rainy British Isles instead of sunny Arizona?

While many of my US-based industry colleagues gather in Phoenix, AZ for the fifth Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) show, I headed east from NY instead of west. The tenth annual Call Centre Expo is being held at the same time in Birmingham, UK. So why, with snow too soon in my NY-based future, did I head for the rainy British Isles instead of sunny Arizona?Perhaps the primary reason was a career enrichment goal to avoid becoming too US-centric in my thinking about the market. I had the luxury of spending two years in Europe working in the late nineties, one year in Holland and another in Belgium, and I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see the world through a slightly less-American set of glasses. I find going back for a show once a year (faithful readers will recall my dismal, and final, trip to CeBit in Germany last March) allows me to keep my hand on the pulse of the European market.

Second, in terms of attendance by key contact center vendors, more were actually exhibiting in Birmingham than in Phoenix. While Aspect and Avaya could be found at both, Genesys, Nortel and Cisco were here in the UK but not at ACCE. I ve had the opportunity to spend time with all of these vendors here, and it was time well spent.

Highlights include:

* Aspect s announcement of that they will be reselling Tellme s hosted voice portal was made in Phoenix but a topic of discussion here in Birmingham as well. Across the board it seems there is more support for by EMEA customers for hosted contact center offerings, so it will be interesting to see when this initially US-centric partnership broadens.

* Nortel had a verrrrry interesting Second Life demo in its stand here. While I have seen similar demos from Avaya and Cisco--of ways to tie the contact center into commercial Second Life environments--none were as content-rich as that delivered by John Gill of Nortel s Galway-based contact center development team. The discussion of analogies that can be drawn between Second Life avatar collision handlers and traditional contact center concepts like CTI and skills-based routing was fascinating.

* Cisco is having a phenomenal growth year in contact center in Europe thanks in part to resellers that are offering their gear for hosting and managed services. We in the US often hear that more hosting is occurring in EMEA than at home and this is the first time that vendors are offering solid proof points to support it.

* As always, the Genesys booth is full of customers and prospects seeing demos of the latest capabilities in Genesys Voice Portal 8 and the great version 8 tools that it introduced, like Genesys Composer and Administrator.

If I were a beer drinker, I d say I m off to have a pint now. In lieu of that, I ll fill out the door tag for a Full English Breakfast and call it a night.