Unified messaging is really an old architecture. It has been around since the mid-'90s. There is a shift happening, because Microsoft is getting into the business. Still, you can't really say that things will change overnight.

Having customers get caught up in a tangle of commands and layers and never getting to an agent has been a constant source of frustration for years. But don't shoot the technology.

They want a common platform, but I'm not sure all the applications on that platform will be theirs.

SIP is going to force these vendors to stop being so proprietary.

It's the business or marketing unit that wants intelligence on the customers. There are still a lot of contact centers that are not integrated with the business unit. It's still considered an expense.

Initially, the contact center was considered a service organization and was asked to do that as efficiently as possible. Quality monitoring as a contact center application is still very much involved in the initial goal of improving customer-facing processes. But importantly, it now has higher value for deriving customer intelligence.