In the race among service providers to differentiate IP  communications offerings, some competitors are targeting the customer relationship management (CRM) market. Integration with CRM systems is common in large enterprises and even smaller companies have embraced the concept.
Now, small business customers utilizing a hosted solution have access to a cream-of-the-crop hosted CRM package: SalesForce.com. 8x8’s ( News - Alert) Packet8 service now integrates with Mark Benioff’s creation.
What does this mean for the market? Simple: powerful services are becoming available to smaller and smaller business customers.
An early computer telephony integration (CTI ) link that allowed similar functionality was developed in the late 1980s, and required an IBM mainframe and a Rockwell automatic call distributor (ACD ). This type of setup cost $1 million or more.
(An aside: the ACD division of Rockwell was sold years later to Concerto, which became Aspect ( News - Alert) and recently received a Microsoft investment.)
Later, in the 1990s, CTI ( News - Alert) became more popular. Novell and Microsoft provided links to their operating systems which PBX and ACD manufacturers used to provide similar functions. Entry-level cost? Maybe $20-$30K.
Today, it is possible to achieve similar functionality for less than $1,000 per year. Even the smallest companies in the world can now compete effectively with the largest.
Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC. In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended IP Communications event, Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO. To read more of Rich’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He blogs for TMCnet here. Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X | | Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
Automated Call Distribution (ACD) | X | | A device used to distribute incoming calls to specific sets of users based on pre-determined criteria....more |
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) | X | | CTI or computer telephony integration is the linking of computing systems with telephone systems. The caller is connected via telephone companies to a customer ACD-PBX. The ACD-PBX passes the teleph...more |
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