451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Aspect turns its eye on the open source call center
Martin Schneider, April 25, 2006 @ 9:21 am ETCall center software vendor Aspect Software says it will provide and support the Digium open source internet protocol (IP) PBX, the Asterisk Business Edition – a commercial version of the industry’s first open source IP –PBX – for customers of its Unified and Signature product lines. This news comes as we are seeing not just a rise in the popularity of open source CRM, but full contact center offerings based on open source projects. (See the recent 451 report on Visitar for more info.)
Overall, we like the pairing of open source and call centers. As organizations look to turn call centers from costly endevaors into more break even or daresay profitable operations, standardizing on open source protocols can take a lot of the costs out of operating what tend to be complex software and hardware stacks where availability and scalability are huge issues. We expect to see a lot more action here on the part of traditional call center vendors to address the growing use of open source tools in the call center.
Comments (3) Categories: Software
Montreal based Aheeva technologies might be have a few years ahead of Aspect software. Around 2003 they embraced Asterisk and decided it to use it as the core of their call center backend. Also, they recently started using Sugar CRM on their new Aheeva Contact Center Suite (CCS) Version 2.0.
Their clients were so happy with the IP PBX open source solution that they were requesting an Open Source CRM so Aheeva decided to incorporate SugarCRM on their new software.
It is also worth mentioning that Aheeva programmers have written some cool proxy modules for Asterisk and made them Open source.
http://aheeva.com/
Hey as per the reviews sugar crm is really good.. it’s open source after all..!!!
It seems to me call centers should always have been profitable operations. Somewhat profitable, maybe not super profitable though.