Aspect continues its steady march to be a major player in unified communications, particularly in the contact center space. (TMC's Rich Tehrani covered the Aspect and UC angle in an earlier post.)
Today the company announced the acquisition of Tewksbury, Mass-based BlueNote Networks.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Leveraging BlueNote's technology, Aspect customers will now be able to extend SIP-based voice, video and other real-time interactive communication services to enterprise users as an integral part of a service oriented architecture (SOA).
According to the release announcing the acquisition:
By combining the features of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) with Web services, organizations will be able to drive innovation in the contact center and across the enterprise while radically lowering the cost and complexity of their voice, video and data services. Specifically, Aspect customers and prospects will now be able to:
· Quickly and easily incorporate SIP-based interactive multichannel communications into their contact centers and internal and customer-facing business processes using industry-standard interfaces and technology.
· Leverage existing IT and telephony application investments and development resources to build and deploy communications-enabled business applications and lay the foundation for enabling globally-reachable communication services and integrated workflow applications.
Today's acquisition reminds me of another similar situation. Nearly one year ago, NEC acquired Sphere Communications, essentially for their SOA technology.
