CISCO & HP ACCELERATE ADOPTION OF CUSTOMER CONTACT SOLUTIONS.

Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. announced a joint initiative to accelerate the deployment of contact center solutions offering global consulting, systems integration and e-services to enterprise and service provider customers. This initiative further strengthens the strategic alliance between the two companies and will enable HP to integrate and resell the customer contact software platform from Cisco's Internet Communications Software Group (ICSG). This will allow enterprises to expand and improve the effectiveness of their customer service and assist service providers in offering contact center services to their enterprise customers.

The joint initiative helps meet the needs of enterprises and service providers to manage multiple contact channels from Web, phone and hat to VoIP, IVR, fax and email in an integrated fashion in support of a seamless and unified customer experience. In addition, this gives customers the ability to add any combination of traditional and IP telephony, rich IP-based software services, as well as new media channels to their customer interactions.

According to Datamonitor, IP-enabled call centers are expected to grow from eight percent in 1998 to more than 40 percent by 2003. Customer contact software solutions enable seamless and complete customer care. For example, a system can route customers to the most appropriate agent, escalate a situation based on previous history and enable Web-based collaboration between a customer and an agent.