Attachmate Integration Solutions Ease Contact Center Pains

Business Wire, May 17, 2007

Attachmate Verastream Helps Contact Center Customers Optimize Their IT Infrastructure, Increase Agent Efficiency and Decrease Training Costs

SEATTLE -- Attachmate Corporation today announced that a growing number of customers are leveraging its Verastream([R])legacy integration software to create more efficient, profitable contact centers. By providing a single point of access to disparate systems and applications, Verastream allows contact centers to re-use their valuable legacy assets along with other contact center technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, to improve customer satisfaction and maximize revenue generation by reducing agent training time, eliminating redundant data entry and increasing call resolution rates.

Attachmate will be in Booth E17 at the ICMI Call Center Demo & Conference in Dallas, May 21-24, to discuss how contact center-centric companies such as AT&T Global Customer Care, British Telecom Retail, Canal , Countrywide Financial, Kansas Department of Human Resources, InfiNet, Miami Herald, PPG Industries, Schenker AB and the State of Delaware Division of Revenue (DOR), among others, are standardizing on Attachmate Verastream to optimize contact center performance. The company will also showcase its work with leading desktop integration solutions provider OpenSpan, located next to Attachmate in Booth E16, to provide comprehensive offerings that improve the contact center desktop environment for agents, IT and Operations by:

* Streamlining application workflow with simple integration projects;

* Building robust desktop automation without coding;

* Creating unified views with composite applications;

* Extending legacy applications with new business; and,

* Using an advanced approach for integrating desktop, host, Java, Windows and Web applications.

"The contact center is the central nervous system that connects the customer to the enterprise. But in today's contact center environments, where agents typically work with five or more desktop applications, lack of communication between those applications often makes it difficult for agents to consistently deliver efficient, real-time service and provide an overall positive contact center experience," said Eric Varness, vice president of marketing at Attachmate. "By breaking down the barriers between desktop applications, Verastream dramatically improves the contact center desktop environment for agents to help organizations improve the customer experience and increase margins."

Attachmate Verastream allows companies to leverage their existing legacy investments to address common contact center needs. The Verastream suite can transform all of an organization's legacy applications into SOA assets by exposing business processes as reusable web services, XML, JavaBeans and .NET components. Verastream generated services can be mixed, matched and reused selectively to extend legacy functionality to new composite applications. No code changes to your legacy applications are required. That means contact centers can avoid risk while speeding up workflow enhancement and the development of a unified desktop interface for its agents.

Canal Group, the leading producer of pay-TV channels in France, leveraged Attachmate Verastream Host Integrator to support the restructuring of its subscriber-management information system, which holds mission-critical data on more than eight million subscribers. To create better efficiencies in the system, the company needed to web-enable a series of 3270 host screens and allow for quick integration of its Siebel system.

"Our objective was to implement a solution with the power to support activity peaks ranging from 800 to 1,000 simultaneous users, based on an average of 40,000 to more than 100,000 calls per day," said Daniel Delgado, IT project director at Canal Group. And they were determined to implement the new solution without compromising quality to their CRM system. "Our CRM structure was fully operational, so we needed to ensure a risk-free environment for the impending transition," said Delgado.

Canal Group selected Attachmate Verastream, which features progressive integration of individual task-based services, providing the ability to handle ongoing changes. As a result, any Canal Group call center operator can get real-time access to all aspects of a subscriber's profile, including associated contracts or options. With all the integrated data available in one easy-to-use interface, the operator can link customers up with new offers while also achieving the best value for the company.

About Verastream

Attachmate's Verastream legacy integration suite is a complete range of mainframe, web and desktop modernization tools built to speed the reuse of legacy application investments. Verastream delivers the full spectrum of basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration. Verastream-generated services can be mixed, matched and reused to extend legacy functionality to new applications or users. No code changes to legacy applications are required.