Unified communications meets business process automation

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 08:22

IT Industry - Strategy

Tight integration between business processes and unified communications systems is something leading UC vendors such as Avaya, Nortel and Cisco have been pushing for some time, but another UC player, Interactive Intelligence, has gone one step further: it aims to leverage its strengths in unified communications to enter the business process automation market.

Interactive Intelligence has announced a new product called Interaction Process Automation. According to founder and CEO, Donald E Brown, "IPA helps organisations increase efficiencies and cut costs by decreasing the number of employees and the amount of time involved in a given business process; by eliminating process latency; by reducing the chance for human error; and by providing standardized methods for handling business processes."

Interactive Intelligence announced the concept last month and it was introduced into Australia this week at a press briefing hosted by country manger, Brendan Maree, held to announce a contract to supply a 126 seat call centre to Teachers Credit Union.

According to Interactive Intelligence, "IPA targets mid-size to large organizations across all industries that require the automation of multi-step, people-centric business processes. Examples include new employee on-boarding, lead management, insurance claims processing, loan application management, new student enrolment, requests for government services, order discount approvals, IPA keeps track of work, progress, people, skills, qualifications, availability, and resources. IPA optimises processes by automatically prioritising and routing work to the best qualified and available worker – regardless of location – for timely completion."

Interactive Intelligence claims that it "easily connects to...enterprise applications to extend process automation to...CRM, financial management software, and various database sources and applications," without complicated programming languages, expensive programmers, and long development cycles.

Business process automation is an established discipline with numerous players, but Interactive Intelligence claims that there are distinct advantages in approaching it from a from unified communications, and it cites IDG research in support of this claim.

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