In 1982 a company called LanguageLine Solutions was founded to focus on helping translate conversations via telephone and since then, the company has grown to 6,000 interpreters who speak 98.6% of the 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. In this same year, TMC launched a magazine focusing on the call center market (now called Customer) and wrote about this company frequently in the subsequent decades.

I recently caught up with LanguageLine representative Linda Taffy who walked me through many of the new services the company offers such as Language Line University which measures the proficiency of multilingual agents. LanguageLine Direct Response is a service which allows your customer who speaks limited English to hear your message when they call in. From there, they first speak with an interpreter who greets them and then changes from being the greeter to an interpreter again. The company also offers a localization and translation service which helps companies keep their websites and documents accurate in other other countries and languages.

Perhaps the most exciting service is Language UC which is a video chat solution which runs on Macs, PCs and tablets. I had a chance to see a demonstration of sign language via an iPad and it was quite fascinating. What I learned was the sign for coffee which is an arm churning looks more to me like butter. But I digress. With this service you could be a traveling salesperson who could go to any country and communicate effectively in meetings by connecting to LanguageLine UC as needed.

Some of the benefits of LanguageLine’s services are you don’t have to hire full-time people on staff and can instead pay as you go. It is worth noting the video service has a license fee as well.

There aren’t too many companies still focusing on the same core business for over 30 years but LanguageLine is certainly one of them. With their new app/video service, they have certainly elevated their offerings and brought themselves current with the times and made their solutions something the mainstream market can use. You might even say the company is now a bit ahead of the times.

In a recent meeting with Joe Staples, CMO and Senior VP of Marketing he told me the company has successfully acted upon its growth strategy from 2006 which was designed to increase its sales to large companies such as Rolex, BMW, Crutchfield, Sony Honda and many others. Their average deal-size in 2005 was in fact $87k and it is now $306 with its number of deals over $1m increasing from just one to 49 on a comparative basis over these seven years.

Interactive Intelligence hasn’t lost track of the companies that helped it get started as evidenced by the launch today of its new CaaS Small Center solution, which gives small contact centers with up to 50 contact center agents many of the same features the vendor has offered for years to the most sophisticated contact centers in the world. Pricing for CaaS Small Center starts at a flat fee of $99 per agent, per month. Included in the offer is the ability to add the company’s cloud-based PBX features for up to 100 non-contact center users.

Joe was sure to point out how mature the company’s offering features recording, UC, real-time speech analytics, quality management, multichannel communications including voice, web chat and social media, routing and real-time speech analytics with keyword spotting. There is also integration with Salesforce and other services out of the box. Finally there are guaranteed service levels, geo-redundancy from 11 global data centers, security, compliance including JITC, and customer isolation through virtualization.

He further explained the company focused on keeping the offering easy to use with limited set-up options and deployment within 15 days instead of months. Other areas of note are the ability to sign a one-year contract to lock in your price – a dedicated implementation manager, Quick Spin which allows you to try before you buy and of course a month-to-month commitment if you prefer this option

Interestingly Interactive Intelligence has gone from a disruptive new entrant in the market to an established player. By offering much of the power of its full contact center solutions in a simple, cost-effective, no-commitment way, it has to some degree slowed the disruption it could see from a new breed of cloud-based solutions providers. Moreover, the benefit Interactive brings to the table is stability as well as scalability – companies want a system that grows with them.

Staples says 65% of contact centers in the world have less than 50 agents but they are often underserved because they buy from a startup or just go with an add-on solution provided by a PBX vendor. In fact, one of the company’s newest customers for this new offering switched from another solution which didn’t allow them to see how many calls were waiting in the queue.

The purpose of CaaS Small Center is to allow these call centers who have the same needs as their larger brethren to access the same features and functions they have on a pay-as-you-go or should I say pay-as-you-grow-basis.

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Nortel’s senior management had large financial incentives to turn the company around quickly and they fraudulently recognized revenue at times which violated GAAP accounting standards in order to pay less bonuses than needed and to ensure they had reserve earnings needed to make the numbers in future quarters which allowed them to receive performance-oriented bonuses.

On March 12, 2007 the US DOJ said as much in a complaint against former execs Frank A. Dunn, Douglas C. Beatty, Michael J. Gollogly and MaryAnne E. Pahapill. "The fraudulent conduct at issue here was egregious and long-running. Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses," said Linda Thomsen, Director of the Commission's Division of Enforcement. "The action we take today sends a strong message that officers of U.S.-filing foreign corporations will be held to the same standards of accountability that are required of all participants in the U.S. financial markets."

Asa result of this incident, the loss of trust between Nortel execs and the public markets, customers, media and analyst community coupled with the company overpaying for acquisitions during the dotcom and telecom bubbles combined with competition from ZTE and Huawei eventually forced this Canadian telecom icon to declare bankruptcy.

This is why I read with some surprise that an Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the case against these same former Nortel Networks execs. The judge, Frank Marrocco said he was "not satisfied" the financials were misrepresented.

Greg Draper, who heads investigative and forensic services at chartered accountancy and business consulting firm MNP, says that the burden of proof was difficult to meet in this case.

"To prove that there was not just intention to do the conduct, moving the money and making the financial statements that were made, but to do it with a criminal purpose to defraud shareholders and the corporation is difficult to prove," he said.

In his judgment, Marrocco said the decision to only release $80 million in excess accruals when it had $189 million to boost numbers during the company's first quarter of 2003 were not out of the ordinary.

This policy did not lead to misrepresenting Nortel's "financial results to the investing public or Nortel's audit committee or Nortel's board of directors," he wrote.

Marrocco concluded the company's statements were restated twice in one quarter to reflect differences of opinion in accounting practices, not as an effort to cover up fraud.

Although the judge found that genuine accrued liabilities were not released when they should have been nor adjusted when they should have been, he was "not satisfied that any or all of the accused understood the extent of the excess accrued liabilities on Nortel's balance sheet." Furthermore, the amount was immaterial to the finances of such a large company, and even if they were not released, the executives would've received their profit bonuses anyway, Marrocco told the court.

At trial, Dunn's lawyer said his client approved the accounting at the telecom equipment maker but should not be held responsible if the figures given to him were inaccurate. At the time, Dunn was preoccupied with trying to save the company and trusted that the balance sheets were correct when he approved them, argued the defense.

"I am satisfied that non-cash impacting excess accrued liabilities on the balance sheet were not a priority," the judge wrote in his decision.

Dunn made the following statement as a result:

For a very long time, integrity has been the foundation of Nortel Networks' corporate governance and business practices. The documentary evidence and testimony re-affirmed this core value that I witnessed over my 28 years with the company," he said. "I am looking forward to turning the page on this chapter of my life.

At one point Nortel had almost 100,000 employees. While Dunn and the other managers are no doubt happy right now, many ex-Nortel staffers may feel like they have just been cheated out of seeing justice served to a management team which helped kill an industry icon.