Gartner Names Altitude as Visionary for Contact Center Solutions

Altitude Software, an independent contact center solutions vendor, announced today that analyst firm Gartner (News - Alert) Inc. has placed the company in the Visionary quadrant in the “Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, EMEA, 2007.” This report was authored by Drew Kraus and Steve Blood.

“More companies worldwide are discovering the value of our award winning suite. We have an extensive track record of transparent operation on top of IP and any communications infrastructure, very fast deployment cycles and open integration with business applications” said Miguel Lopes, Vice President, Marketing and Product Management, in a Wednesday statement.

“In 2007 alone, Altitude Software (News - Alert) made significant investments in its operations in North America and Central Europe, while establishing a direct presence and building delivery capabilities in crucial markets in India, Philippines and the wider Pacific Region.”

According to the Gartner report, "The opportunity for product consolidation and platform replacement is huge, especially given the migration to IP telephony. And as companies start the consolidation process for telephony, they can look again at the architecture for contact centers.

Companies should focus their future investments on software-oriented technologies, rather than proprietary hardware, using a common IP telephony layer to consolidate contact center applications.”

The Altitude IP Contact Center is offered as a modular, yet complete software suite that uses Altitude uCI (Unified Customer Interaction) suite and the Altitude vBox, a contact center optimized soft switch running on standard hardware and based on Asterisk (News - Alert).

The solution is positioned as providing businesses with a SIP-based multimedia contact center solution, in addition to a variety of advanced features, such as unified desktops, routing, reporting, dialing, voice portal, management and open integration through Web services and/or Altitude connectors.

What makes the Altitude uCI suite architecture unique to the industry is that it is provided with a single language and editor to all media interaction simultaneously and in real-time on IP-PBXs and/or traditional PBXs.

Gartner noted that visionaries demonstrate a clear understanding of the contact center market and they are innovative and provide indications of the market’s future.

The challenge for these companies is that they typically lack the ability to influence a large part of the market, have yet to expand their sales and support capabilities on a region-wide basis, or do not yet have the funding to execute their strategy with the same capabilities as the Leaders.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant analyses the major players in an industry and categorizes them as "leaders," "challengers," "visionaries" or "niche players".

Gartner is well respected throughout the world and any classification from this firm that puts the positive spotlight on a company is a good thing. For Altitude, it indicates that the company is on the right path for providing its customers with solutions that help them to become more efficient and productive. In the contact center industry, supplying solutions that meet these key goals can contribute greatly to long-term success.

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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.

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