Today contact center and call center architectures reflect a strong hardware centric model based on a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) heritage. The current state of the art contact center has layered on a variety of applications including skills-based routing, screen pops with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications, and multi-media customer input channels. Many companies have multiple contact centers that are across the country or worldwide. While this approach provides a local presence for the business, it can create costs and inefficiencies. Each location requires servers and applications: the switch, the contact center software, reporting, workforce management, etc. When these components are replicated for each contact center site, the cost and complexity can be significant. Add the requirements for communication, call transfers and call coverage between sites, the cost and complexity rise even more. Contact Center solutions based on IP begin to address these issues by introducing a "flatten, consolidate, and extend" approach to consolidating multiple contact centers over an IP network. A single central location (and perhaps a second for survivability) serves as the heart of the operation, providing the intelligence and the contact center applications. Other sites serve as a gateway off the centralized hub. Cost effective communication between the centralized site and satellite locations is achieved by using IP for the communication path. With centralization, the network is flattened and costs associated with multiple instances of each application are drastically reduced. One consolidated contact center now serves the business - eliminating the need for network pre-route solutions and their associated cost and complexities. In addition, this approach becomes cost effective for extending the contact center to areas of the business that previously did not have coverage. Companies gain a larger agent pool by eliminating the geographical constraints they've always had to consider. It becomes easier to provide consistent customer support and a consistent brand image. IP becomes an enabler of business transformation and saves real dollars. SIP can take this a step further by introducing a single standard interface for all connectivity, including adding endpoints, deploying contact center adjunct services, or even connecting trunk services for external communications. Proprietary signaling protocols and hardware-intensive digital/analog interfaces give way to a simple logical SIP interface that connects application servers residing on industry standard platforms. This new modular server architecture can be software-centric, which will simplify upgrades and promote greater flexibility by enabling the rapid deployment of new services. | 
