Asterisk’s userbase has gotten even bigger now that Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company (PARIS: ALU) and (NYSE: ALU), has announced its decision to support the Asterisk® open source IP PBX platform. According to the president and SEO of Genesys, Wes Hayden, they decided to formally support Asterisk to be able to meet customer demands. Furthermore he stated that, “The increased importance of SIP and standards-based technology has paved the way for using open source for contact centres. We have reached a point where Asterisk and SIP are mature, reliable and proven technologies.”

The response of Genesys customers was very positive with companies like Groupama Rhône Alpes Auvergne in France, E.Novation Contact Centers in the Netherlands, and Global Speech Networks in Australia all announcing their own deployment of their use of Genesys on Asterisk. It is expected that more companies will soon follow suit as the use of of open source is highly beneficial to them cost-wise. In addition to these using an open platform gives them much flexibility, which is very important to be able to develop the highly customised environments that is required of contact centre service providers.

The move by Genesys is clearly advantageous not only to Digium and Genesys’s clients but to the VoIP technology as a whole. Since Genesys is the leading provider of software for major contact centres then their use of Asterisk is sure to help hasten the acceptance VoIP technology in the contact centre industry. Currently Genesys is the only company worldwide focusing its entire resources on software meant to manage customer services through the phone, web and email. The customer-base Genesys’ 4,000 clients interact with each day is approximately about 100 million (individual) people. The impact of even just a percentage of the 4,000 Genesys clients shifting to IP technology or at least incorporating it with the existing technology they use will be an unbelievable boost to IP. At the moment though only a few, as mentioned earlier, have actively embraced the new platform. Although contact centres are enthusiastic about adopting this new standard being pushed by Genesys it will of course take some time to transition from their old systems. Transitioning to IP technology is expected by most contact centres to start in about 2 years.

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