Spanlink Acquires Calabrio, Inc., a Leading Provider of Workforce Management and Scheduling Software.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Acquisition Builds on Spanlink's Vision of Delivering the Industry's Leading SOA-Based Software Suite Focused on the Customer Interaction Business Process

Spanlink Communications, Inc., a leading provider of customer interaction solutions that leverage VoIP-based unified communications technologies, announced today that it has acquired Calabrio, Inc., and its industry-leading software for distributed workforce management (WFM) and scheduling. Based in Longueuil, Quebec, Canada, Calabrio's workforce management solutions have contributed to the success of hundreds of call and contact centers in North America, Europe, Africa and South America.

This acquisition brings Spanlink closer to realizing its vision of becoming the leading software suite provider that focuses on transforming the business process for customer interaction in a services oriented architecture (SOA). This approach enables businesses to improve customer interactions by making supervisors and agents more productive at all stages of customer interaction, including how they manage their time, interact with their customers and collaborate with their teams.

"VoIP and SOA-based unified communications technologies are fueling a change in the contact center and customer service markets towards virtualization, placing new requirements on how contact centers manage people and processes. At the same time, we find our customers want to buy their technology solutions from a single source," said Brett Shockley, founder and CEO of Spanlink. "By building a comprehensive suite for customer interaction that includes a strong workforce optimization solution for our customers, we are bridging that gap in the marketplace."

The Calabrio acquisition extends the Spanlink(R) InteractiveEdge family of products, which includes Spanlink(R) Quality Management for recording, evaluation and training, to provide a comprehensive workforce optimization (WFO) offer for IP-based contact centers. With the addition of CALABRIO(R) Workforce Management software, Spanlink now offers workforce scheduling, adherence, key performance metrics and additional reporting capabilities into the agent and supervisors desktop views.

"CALABRIO provides the most standard features of any workforce management software solution in the marketplace," said Rene LeBel, founder and CEO of Calabrio. "As a result of this acquisition, customers will realize even more value as the CALABRIO product becomes part of the strong, integrated suite that Spanlink has created for IP-based customer interaction."

From its start in 1995, Calabrio was one of the first companies to provide multi-site and multi-channel management capabilities to today's evolving contact centers. The Spanlink CALABRIO product offers unmatched forecasting and scheduling accuracy - up to 99.5% - as well as a full range of additional capabilities such as skills- and performance-based scheduling, key performance indicators (KPIs), vacation scheduling, payroll integration, and much more. As a result, customers can dramatically improve productivity, employee satisfaction and efficiency, driving customer service and profitability. Spanlink CALABRIO is a fully multi-lingual system, operating in multiple languages simultaneously.

"With this acquisition, Spanlink continues to move aggressively into the workforce optimization market with a Cisco-based solution designed to meet the needs of customers looking for a full-featured, competitive suite of customer interaction software that is architected for virtual, IP-based contact centers," said Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. "Spanlink's innovative offering also accommodates the critical role of the supervisor in managing virtual contact centers more effectively."

Spanlink has been delivering packaged agent and supervisor desktop software applications for more than a decade, with more than 1,000 IP installations and solutions on more than 300,000 desktops (now 400,000 desktops with the Calabrio acquisition). These full-featured products focus on agent productivity, team quality management, and customer service excellence. Key features of the software suite include: configurable automated workflows focused on business process best-practices; presentation of key performance indicators (KPIs) to agents and supervisors; enterprise application integration and screen pop (commonly known as CTI), silent monitoring; presence; IM/chat; compliance recording and quality management; and support for multi-channel contact centers and remote or home agents.

Built in a SOA framework, Spanlink software today supports multiple ways for integrated enterprise or third party applications such as Siebel/Oracle, Salesforce.com, Remedy and others, with little or no programming.

"Exceeding 1,000 installations is a demonstration of Spanlink's commitment and ability to deliver solutions that enhance the Cisco contact center solution," said Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of Cisco System's customer contact business unit. "The acquisition of Calabrio will extend Spanlink's ability to help companies manage by metrics and improve business process."

About Spanlink Communications, Inc.

Spanlink Communications is a leading provider of customer interaction solutions that leverage VoIP-based unified communications technology. With nearly 20 years experience, Spanlink develops and markets customer interaction software, workforce optimization software and system management software that helps customers exploit the benefits of virtual unified communications networks for business transformation. Spanlink applies expert planning, migration, integration and support services to tailor each customer's solution and support plan to its business needs for transformational business improvements in productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Find news and information at www.spanlink.com.