August 16, 1999

By: Nancy Pieretti, Public Relations Manager

Call Center Magazine recently honored Wayne Andrews, director of technology in Cisco's Application Technology Group (ATG), with a Pioneer Award for significant contributions to the call center industry. Call Center Magazine, the market's most influential publication, honors 10 industry leaders every year for their achievements. Among this year's winners are Chairman Tom Siebel, Siebel Systems and EVP James Long, Nortel Networks.

Wayne's award was granted for the innovative software technology he and his team developed at GeoTel Communications Corporation, a recent Cisco acquisition. When Wayne founded GeoTel in 1993, its products were among the first to take advantage of the newly opened telecommunications networks by providing open, network-level intelligent call routing software to Fortune 1,000 companies like American Express, Fidelity Investments, Delta Air Lines and CitiCorp.

GeoTel's technology changed the call center industry by giving customers choice and control over public switched networks. Prior to GeoTel, customers were limited to using proprietary call center solutions offered by carriers and switch vendors.

As soon as an end-user enters the last digit of an 800 number, the application determines who is calling and why, and instructs the carrier network where to send the call - all in just 250 milliseconds. Simultaneously, customer-profile data specific to the transaction are sent to the agent's desktop in the form of a screen-pop, personalizing service and streamlining customer service. In addition to phone calls, the technology processes incoming contacts from the Web, fax, e-mail and other multimedia channels. Solutions are provided for premises-based enterprise deployments as well as for network-hosted service provider implementations.

"It's an honor to be recognized for the advances in call center software technology that GeoTel has brought to market," said Wayne Andrews. "This is a pioneering product that integrates the multiple technology platforms in a call center infrastructure into a single, seamless environment. It's also been very exciting that Cisco is using the technology as the basis for the Voice over IP-based Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) product."

Cisco Forms Application Technology Group

At Cisco, Wayne's ATG technology team is working closely with the Enterprise and Service Provider LOBs on the shift toward convergence that will merge data, voice and video on a single network infrastructure. One of the primary benefits of a converged IP network is support for applications that take advantage of multiple media types.

In a traditional call center voice network, data, voice and video are all carried on separate communication infrastructures requiring the purchase, installation and operation of multiple networks. These networks have been treated as separate, incompatible technologies that are expensive to maintain in cooperation with each other. With a traditional approach, there is no unified view of customer preferences and a company's business rules have to be configured in many places including the ACD and Interactive Voice Response system.

In Cisco's New World Contact Center, a converged IP network infrastructure can accommodate all customer interaction channels - voice, Web, e-mail and video - on a single network. Not only is this method less expensive to purchase, own and operate, but business rules can be configured and managed in a single place so that the customer experience is unique yet consistent across all media.

If you have any suggestions, comments or questionsplease contact Nancy Pieretti.