The enterprise instant messaging market might be a crowded, competitive field. But one new firm sees it missing out on a key application for the technology.
"A lot of companies focus on enterprise instant messaging, but we didn't see many focusing on what we call customer-facing sales and service messaging," said Perry Price, a co-founder of Saint Paul, Minn.-based startup Revation Systems.
In 2002, Price and partner Mark Pietras applied their background in Voice Over IP (both were executives at VOIP player Aravox, now a unit of Alcatel) toward providing tools to enable the call center industry to leverage IM as effectively as it utilizes voice.
Since then, the firm has attracted a number of clients, including V P Marketing, Northern Metals, and Skyline Exhibits and St. Paul Venture Capital.
"We came up with a technology that allows any customer that buys our solution to have their customers reach them instantly," Price said.
The company's complete Live solution includes an enterprise IM server, a module for linking IM to Web interfaces or to e-mail -- providing for "click to chat" functionality -- and another module providing for call center-like messaging routing and queuing.
At the heart of the offering -- available in both hosted and deployed models -- is the company's IM server, dubbed ServerLive.
The system runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows Server 2003, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris x86. The system also provides for database integration, file sharing (outbound only, for security purposes) and end-to-end encryption, while also enabling the logging of conversations and transmitted files.
The system also creates opportunities to extend presence data and messaging outside of the firewall, to other organizations using Revation. Two ServerLive implementations can link together, using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for server-to-server communications -- creating opportunities for companies to chat with partners and clients. (That capability also serves as the underpinnings for Revation's hosted service, live.revation.com.)
With such features, it's not surprising that the company said a handful of clients are using the solution exclusively for their internal enterprise IM needs.
Yet that's not Revation's core focus, which hinges on its robust call center add-on, ContactCenterLive, and LinkLive, a module that distributes IM and presence externally, to create a customer-facing apparatus.
Within the call center, ContactCenterLive adds a bevy of management tools for controlling routing and inquiry queuing features to ServerLive.
"It's unlimited as to how you want to set up your call center," Price said. "You can make it load-balanced, so all ten agents are evenly distributed, and we can control the number of sessions per agent. Or you can make it a linear [round-robin] distribution. Or a combination of the two."
On the customer-facing side, LinkLive builds on those capabilities by enabling companies to display presence -- either that of an individual, or of a group of call center agents -- on a Web page or in an e-mail (or in any other document that supports HTML).
To initiate a conversation with a call center agent, customers click on an embedded status indicator; chatting and file transfers take place through a Web-based IM client. (Within the call center, company reps rely on a secure, standalone IM client called CommunicatorLive.)
Control over how users' presence is conveyed to the outside world can be very tightly managed. For instance, LinkLive can expose the presence data of a single call center representative, of a group of reps -- for use in directing customer inquiries to a team of call center agents, -- or of a user who isn't necessarily available for IM, at all:
"We're working with a large law firm now," Price said. "They give customers an [HTML-enabled] 'living business card' ... that gives presence for this lawyer who manages the account, but the links [for initiating IM] would actually come into his assistant. We can share presence, but link to somebody else -- share what looks like his presence, but it's actually his assistant's."
Competition, and What's Ahead
While Revation's founders got their start in the space because they perceived a lack of suppliers for the IM-enabled call center, they're still quick to acknowledge that the field isn't without its competitors -- some of whom have been playing in the field for years.
Six-year-old FaceTime Communications -- now a leader in the IM gateway space -- actually got its start in the IM-enabled call center. More recent entrants, like LivePerson, further expanded the market for IM customer support. Meanwhile, telephony players -- who already have inroads into the call center -- are increasingly getting into the IM game.
That's one reason that Revation sees itself competing on 'bang for the buck.'
"Skyline Exhibits was our first production customer -- they have approximately 1,500 sales district partners ... and they have 12 people that support those folks, and wanted to offer them a means to have text chat," Price said. "They looked at our competitors -- too pricey -- and at an iPBX solution, but it didn't have some of the capabilities they wanted, like ... flexible routing."
"The feedback we've received is that ... competing solutions are sometimes cost-prohibitive," he added. "We make it easy and get the pricing in line with the value proposition."
That's not to say that Revation is resting on its laurels after its early successes. In the coming 2.0 upgrade -- due out near mid-year -- the firm intends to target highly regulated industries, like financial services, with beefed-up compliance and reporting features.
"It'll be the equivalent of a logging system that you'd have for a telephone system or e-mail system," Price said. "It will include a basic compliance manager, so you can go back and see when Perry and Christopher spoke over LinkLive, whether Perry use the word 'guarantee.'"
The upcoming version also will include a reporting module for ContactCenterLive, which will enable call center administrators to analyze their organization's efficiency -- for example, through reports on the number and length of sessions handled by agents, and on agents' presence and availability times.
"It's a little bit of 'Big Brother is Watching You,'" Price said, "but the call center managers really like it when we talk about that one."
Further down the road, Price said the company plans to expand its server-to-server integration effort by supporting sharing user data with Microsoft's Live Communication Server -- which also relies on SIP and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) -- and with IBM Lotus Instant Messaging, via that product's SIP/SIMPLE gateway.
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.
How can your business leverage IM for customer support and sales? Join us at the Instant Messaging Planet Spring Conference and Expo, March 3 and 4 in Boston. Sessions include: "Communication Focus: Marketing and Messaging in Desktop and Mobile IM
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