Telecom is going through a paradigm shift with VoIP dictating the direction. This has profound impact on business verticals where voice communication is a critical sub-set of their overall system. For example, sales and service departments, dealerships and similar functional units use custom applications and ERP systems which co-exist with good telephony platform. There are also other custom applications built to manage unique processes that require CTI functionality to handle voice communications. As these domains move forward with next generation systems for their business verticals they will require a next generation telephony platform with VoIP capabilities.
The well known brands like Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and Alcatel provide VoIP enabled phone systems with ACD. But there are very few systems as omni-present as Asterisk, which has grown in stature to become the dominant hybrid PBX with VoIP. As an off-shoot of the open source software development for telephony, Asterisk offers an opportunity to reduce the overall cost of deploying feature rich and scalable phone systems. Support is available from Digium through commercial agreements as well.
Applications handling voice telephony require sophisticated ACD. If we look at the needs of organizations like large automobile centers handling parts sales and service, travel agency contact centers handling cruise-ship bookings or customer service departments of online web stores, the level of sophistication required for the ACD becomes obvious. The IVR, call-flow, call routing and call handling demand versatility from the ACD. Automatic call distribution is a general term used to collectively describe the ability of a phone system to handle, prioritize and process calls in conjunction with business data and flow. An office will generally be a combination of PBX extensions and call center agents. The end points are PBX extensions or on-hook or off-hook call center agents. Large volume call center agents are generally on-hook with head-sets where as small volume call centers might want their agents to be on-hook and be ready to multi-task between calls. Integrating an ACD into any business application (CTI integration) requires an efficient and feature rich API. Indosoft recognized this need as early as 2004 and set about developing an ACD that works with Asterisk. Now it offers a scalable feature rich ACD with .NET and socket API for CTI integration of its call center ACD for Asterisk. Business verticals can migrate to Asterisk telephony for its next generation product using Indosoft ACD.