Contact Center News for 22 June 2006: Aspect, Identity Theft, Cistera

Aspect Software (News - Alert), Inc., which bills itself "the world's largest company solely focused on the contact center," has announced that Aspect CEO James D. Foy has received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 award in the software category in New England.

According to Ernst & Young, the award recognizes "outstanding entrepreneurs who are building and leading dynamic, growing businesses."

Within a four-year period beginning in 2001, Foy led the integration of six contact center technology providers, ultimately creating Aspect Software, a contact center provider with more than 30 years of cumulative experience in automatic call distribution, workforce management, predictive dialing, voice portals and multichannel contact.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

His entrepreneurial merger-and-acquisition strategy, Aspect officials say, created the largest company in the world solely focused on delivering products and services for in-house and outsourced contact centers.

Cistera Networks, a vendor of advanced IP phone application platforms and engines in the Enterprise VoIP Telephony environment, has announced two new products, the Cistera ConvergenceServer 7500 and Cistera CallCenterEnterprise v1.7.

The CisteraConvergenceServer 7500 is designed for Enterprise VoIP installations with large numbers of users and monitoring requirements. Depending on the configuration, it can support up to 100,000 directory users or 600 simultaneous recorders.

The CCS 7500 supports four Intel (News - Alert) Xeon Processors and up to a maximum of 36GB of memory. It runs the Cistera v1.6 platform and will support the CallCenterEnterprise v1.7.

The Cistera CallCenterEnterprise v1.7 will offer Call Center administrators and supervisors additional features including remote monitoring, screen capture, Integrated IM client with improved presence support, coaching, desktop remote control and others.

CCEv1.7 also includes all of the popular functionality from Cistera CallCenterRecord Enhanced such as quality reporting, remote web monitoring and QA sampling. The CCS integrates seamlessly with Cisco's IP Contact Center Express and Enterprise.

In addition, according to more than 8,200 IT security professionals from 62 countries, polled in a worldwide study by CIO Magazine and PricewaterhouseCoopers, companies experienced an average of 824 security incidents or events over the past 12 months with the majority of these events being the result of malicious code or unauthorized entry to information assets.

Lawrence says it’s not attacks from outside hackers that are the biggest technology security concerns for organizations today. Instead, there has been an increasing number of identity theft cases in which the hacker is actually a company employee.

According to the same CIO/PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, the number of employee-related attacks is up, at 33 percent compared with 2004's 28 percent. Former employees remain a likely source of the security threats, representing 20 percent of events.

In fact, Lawrence writes, the Yankee Group estimates that 50 percent of security problems in 2004 originated from internal sources, up from 30 percent in 2003. It takes less than five minutes for such employees, particularly those in the contact center who have proper access to customer data, to steal someone’s identity.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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