SAN ANTONIO - August 7, 2007 - AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) has announced that Cisco® Unified Contact Center has been certified by AT&T Labs for compatibility and interoperability with AT&T's recently announced Internet Protocol (IP) Toll-Free service. As a result, the industry-leading Cisco Unified Contact Center can now be used with AT&T's IP Toll-Free service, which allows business customers to efficiently manage and intelligently route calls by using some of the most powerful features in the industry.
"AT&T IP Toll-Free service is a powerful addition to an end-to-end contact center solution that allows customers to utilize the reach and scalability of the AT&T network to complement their Cisco premise-based IP-enabled solution," said Peggy Sexton, vice president, Business-VOIP, AT&T. "Since the launch of this service in April, we've seen increasing customer demand for this service."
AT&T's IP Toll-Free service has a robust set of toll-free features, including announcement options, routing management and reporting features. Through the convergence of enterprise voice and data networks, customers are able to bolster the efficiency and capabilities of toll-free services used in contact centers, conferencing, voice messaging and other critical toll-free applications. AT&T IP Toll-Free seamlessly interoperates with capabilities that current AT&T Toll- Free services customers realize today and provides a platform for smooth migration to a user's IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) contact center.
"Businesses migrating their voice services to advanced IP networks can also count on our two companies to work to deliver fully-managed unified contact center solutions," said Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Customer Contact business unit. "We are pleased to be working with AT&T business customers to help them lower costs and increase productivity by using managed services based on Cisco solutions."
AT&T and Cisco will continue to integrate important extensions to the industry standard, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which will help ensure interoperability with upcoming AT&T IP Toll-Free service feature enhancements. SIP-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network technology allows for call transfers to take place either before or after calls are answered. These information-delivery extensions allow more data in more formats to be delivered to the transferring party or forwarded to the final called party.
The new capabilities are designed to further improve the call-handling efficiency and resource optimization and, as a result, further reduce the customer's cost structure. The powerful combination of AT&T and Cisco solutions will further extend the reach and scale of a customer's contact center network while reducing the complexity of building new Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) applications.
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