This last week I had the opportunity to spend the week with Interactive Intelligence and 500+ of our joint customers at the Interactive User Forum in Indianapolis.  Interactive will always have a special place in my heart, as they were one of the first companies to "get it" by integrating SIP into their contact center solution Customer Interaction Center. 

It all started roughly 10 years ago with Interactive Intelligence selecting the AudioCodes TP-260 PCI boards.  This allowed the current (at the time) architecture using H.100 TDM switching to stream voice out to IP Phones that would reside on contact center agent desktops.  This innovative approach would eventually allow contact centers to hire agents virtually anywhere, allowing them reside in remote work centers or home, tethered by any broadband connection.

Later we collaborated with Interactive to migrate the H.100-based call switching matrix to SIP, which started a significant increase in scaling and flexibility.  This architecture leveraged AudioCodes media gateways to connect their software-based CIC 3.0 to the public networks.  As a result, we commonly see contact centers with 1,000s of agents serviced from on-premise servers or Cloud-based Communications as a Service (Caas) implementations.

More recently we've added our Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) to the portfolio, enabling SIP Trunking without the interoperability and security issues that come with SIP firewalls or direct connections.

Overall it's been a great relationship that I know will someday yield a 20-year anniversary.


 

Related articles

• The Emergence of the Enterprise Session Border Controller (tmcnet.com)