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RFI Analysis: IP Contact Centers: Page 2 of 50


By The Numbers
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Although some vendors officially support or certify "any" fax server and others list just a few, we suspect there's no technological reason for this. Rather, it is a conscious decision for simplifying technical support (if they don't officially support a fax, they don't have to mess with it) or indicates different definitions of support. All vendors should support any fax server that turns incoming faxes into an e-mail. At that point, you're dealing with standard e-mail, not proprietary fax devices.


Vendors At A Glance
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One important aspect of a contact center is integration with CRM (customer relationship management) software. Every vendor says integration of business apps can be done quickly and easily. We're skeptical, but verifying integration ease goes beyond the scope of this RFI. CosmoCom, Interactive Intelligence, Nuasis and Telephony@Work offer free developer kits with their products, but no matter which vendor you choose, you'll probably have to write some code or use professional services to get the contact-center product talking to your CRM application. CosmoCom, Siemens and Telephony@Work have the most extensive lists of supported CRM apps, followed by Genesys and Interactive Intelligence. If you're looking for support on a specific CRM suite, check out questions 18 and 20 in our full RFI responses.

All the participating vendors support Microsoft Exchange, and all but Concerto and Genesys support or certify Lotus Domino/Notes. Avaya is the only vendor that doesn't support Apache Web servers.