InformationWeek

The new company, known as Avaya, will be spun off by Sept. 30 to sell CRM and call-center management software and telecommunications technology to businesses. Avaya's first move was to team with Siebel. The vendors will pool development, marketing, and sales resources to build a series of new products that combine Siebel's CRM applications with Lucent's telecom and call-center infrastructure.

"Companies need to transform call centers into interaction centers," says Don Peterson, Avaya's president and CEO. With that in mind, the joint-development team will develop up to eight application packages that focus on areas such as computer-telephony integration, interaction-center workflow, and E-mail routing. The first of those will appear in the fourth quarter.

Nexstar Financial Services Inc., a customer of Lucent and Siebel, is looking forward to the integrated apps; it hopes they'll provide a more consistent experience to customers over all channels. The St. Louis mortgage company built some of those capabilities into its customer-interactions system but had to do the integration itself, says Richard Harkwell, Nexstar's VP of customer experience.

The Siebel partnership will help Avaya battle Nortel Networks Corp., which last fall acquired Clarify Inc., in the growing market for combined CRM and call-center management software. The convergence of these technologies will benefit businesses because call-center reps will be able to access customer-interaction data stored in CRM systems, says Sheila McGee Smith, an analyst at the Pelorus Group.