Macquarie Telecom signs $250,000 call deal

By Beverley Head
Monday, 16 November 2009 14:34

IT Industry - Market

IP communications supplier Interactive Intelligence has edged out six other vendors to secure a 25 seat call management deal from Macquarie Telecom that it believes could eventually grow to a 500 seat deal.

Brendan Maree, country manager for Interactive Intelligence in Australia and New Zealand, said the deal which had been stitched up with its reseller partner CallTime Solutions was worth around $250,000 and involved taking Macquarie’s in house call management system and feeding it into Interactive’s Automatic Call Distributor.

Maree said the field of seven suppliers which bid for the work was eventually narrowed to just two, and he guessed Interactive Intelligence had won the deal off Cisco.
Clarification: Macquarie Telecom subsequently told iTWire that while Interactive Intelligence remains a preferred option, contract negotiations have not concluded and a deal has yet to be signed. See story.

He also announced yesterday that CallTime had completed the deployment of a 20 site, 500 seat communications solution using Interactive Intelligence products for Hornsby Shire Council in Sydney’s north.

Maree said that up until three years ago the company had been largely focussed on supplying smaller contact centres with between 50 and 100 seats. However “The outlook for 2010 is that there are a number of larger opportunities,” said Maree adding that the company was bidding to supply systems for a 540 seat centre, a 600 seat centre, “and 150 seats in Sydney that could grow to 1600 globally.”

Joseph Staples, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Interactive Intelligence, who is visiting Sydney, agreed that until four years ago the company operated mainly in the SME call centre space. But in the last quarter he said the company had signed four deals worth over $US1 million and 11 worth more than $US250,000.

“Four years ago we didn’t even see million dollar deals.”

The company is also experiencing an increasing interest from customers who want communications delivered as a service. Staples said communications- as-a-service accounted for 10 per cent of revenues in the last quarter.

Positioned last month by Gartner in the ‘visionaries’ portion of its 2009 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, Interactive Intelligence is continuing to innovate. Staples said that at the end of November the company would launch its Interactive SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) Station complete with headphones for $US49, which he claimed was less than half the cost of a standard IP phone.

In the first half of 2010 it will also introduce what it calls Bullseye Routing, which will allow incoming calls to be automatically directed to the most appropriately skilled person available in the contact centre.