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Vonmag.com
February 27, 2008
by Doug Mohney.
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Digium CEO Danny Windham will deliver a keynote address at VON.x
on Wednesday, March 18.
Aheeva Technology (www.aheeva.com), a leader in call center software, has become a select Digium reseller, building upon a five year history of working with Digium and Asterisk software. Meanwhile, PIKA Technologies has announced the PIKA Fax software for Asterisk, enabling developers to reliability build fax capabilities onto Asterisk.
Last year, Aheeva became a Digium-certified Asterisk Professional "dCAP" and training partner and has decided to take the next logical step – becoming a reseller of Digium products. When the company started up five years ago, the founders decided to base its Contact Center Solution (CCS) on Asterisk. CCS, a customer contact and relations management platform, has won multiple awards and is a highly scalable contact center solution.
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tectonic.co.za
March 19, 2007
Bizcall, Aheeva offer OSS for call centres
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IP telephony provider BizCall has partnered with Canadian company Aheeva to offer an open source based enterprise call centre solution for the South African market.
The Aheeva Contact Centre Suite is based on the open-source Asterisk PBX and telephony application, but has additional functionality so that it is better suited for large call centres. "Asterisk is perfect for the entry-level to mid-level call centre, but larger call centres need additional features like detailed reporting and power dialling. So far these have only been available with expensive proprietary solutions; Aheeva is the first to offer an open-source contender that can hold its own against the big players," says BizCall's Michael Toop
Toop expounded on the benfits of the suite, citing benefits such as lower pricing, simplicity and ease of use. "It enables clients to establish a superior full-service contact centre for a fraction of the investment required to operate a traditional telephony switch-based call centre. It's completely web-enabled so it supports remote monitoring, management and analysis from anywhere there is an Internet connection."
Real-time statistics and quality monitoring tools have also been built in. Toop says the Contact Centre Suite offers skills-based routing for inbound calls and a range of dialling modes for outbound calls (predictive, preview, progressive and broadcast dialling).
"There's huge global interest in open-source telephony solutions and Aheeva is leading the pack," says Toop. "We're delighted to be able to offer this exciting new technology in South Africa."
Aheeva channel manager, Mario Kreslin, says he is "confident that the BizCall team, with its history in telephony and highly skilled personnel, will lead the South African market to the benefits of this evolving global market trend."
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callcentres.net
March 15, 2007
BizCall, Aheeva partner to offer open-source based enterprise call centre solutions
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IP telephony provider BizCall, a member of the Alt-X listed DataPro Group, has partnered with Canadian company Aheeva to offer an open-source based enterprise call centre solution for the South African market.
The Aheeva Contact Centre Suite is based on the open-source Asterisk PBX and telephony application, says BizCall's Michael Toop, but has additional functionality that makes it more suitable for large call centres. "Asterisk is perfect for the entry-level to mid-level call centre, but larger call centres need additional features like detailed reporting and power dialling. So far these have only been available with expensive proprietary solutions; Aheeva is the first to offer an open-source contender that can hold its own against the big players."
As well as open-source pricing, says Toop, the Aheeva Contact Centre Suite offers outstanding simplicity and ease of use. "It enables clients to establish a superior full-service contact centre for a fraction of the investment required to operate a traditional telephony switch-based call centre. It's completely web-enabled so it supports remote monitoring, management and analysis from anywhere there is an Internet connection."
Toop says the Contact Centre Suite offers skills-based routing for inbound calls and a range of dialling modes for outbound calls including predictive, preview, progressive and broadcast dialling. Quality monitoring tools and real-time statistics are built in.
"There's huge global interest in open-source telephony solutions and Aheeva is leading the pack," says Toop. "They won a Best of Show award at last year's International Customer Management Institute Annual Call Center Exhibition in Seattle, one of the world's largest trade shows for the industry. More recently they were also named Best of Show at the Technology Marketing Corporation's Internet Telephony Conference and Expo at Fort Lauderdale. We're delighted to be able to offer this exciting new technology in South Africa."
Aheeva Channel Manager Mario Kreslin says he is "confident that the BizCall team, with its history in telephony and highly skilled personnel, will lead the South African market to the benefits of this evolving global market trend."
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itworldcanada.com
March 31, 2006
Some companies beginning to realize benefits of marriage
by Tim Wilson.
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Francois Lambert, CO of Aheeva Technology Inc., a Montreal-based company that develops and markets IP-based contact centre solutions, is committed to open-source VoIP.
He said his firm is focusing primarily on Asterisk, an open-source private branch exchange (PBX), primarily developed and sponsored by Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium, a telephony hardware manufacturer.
"We are focusing mostly on Asterisk, which makes money providing professional services and selling its Business Edition," said Lambert. "(Digium) doesn't reveal the source code, but it's still very cheap at $1,000 for 30 users."
Lambert claimed that the switch was a little buggy at first, but Aheeva enhanced it with answering machine and call progress detection. Putting more functionality back into Asterisk isn't a big concern for Aheeva."
"We benefit from making Asterisk more stable," said Lambert. "We promote Asterisk around the world and have a good relationship with Digium."
Besides, the company can keep some functionality to itself. For example, Aheeva developed a lot of features on top of Asterisk, allowing it to offer blended or inbound/outbound agents. All calls can be recorded, and Aheeva has a workforce management module that allows a contact centre to trace agent adherence to schedules.
Aheeva has been having great success with open-source VoIP. They have a sister company, Atelca, with a 400-seat contact centre, and a Canadian customer with 30 seats, plus a wealth of global customers in Ecuador, Mexico, Germany, South Africa, France and Chile.
Atelca uses a Linux soft phone. Said Lambert, "The only license we had to buy for Atelca was Windows." Speaking of the technology, Lambert was confident.
"We looked elsewhere," he said, "but Asterisk is stable and, compared to Avaya or Genesis, for a 200-phone system you would save probably millions of dollars."
This is still telephony, and in an open-source environment a company like Aheeva has to have good people to secure the quality of service, the proper switch and the right setup. Overall, the company has put in 3.5 years in total product development.
Jon "Maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International, sees no reason for not using open source for VoIP. When asked at VON Mexico to address security and open-source VoIP, he was quick to reply: "There is no evidence that closed source or open source is any better at preventing people from doing break-ins."
For an open-source solution for PBX, Hall said there are "a lot of tricks. I wouldn't use an Intel processor for it. I'd use a Power PC instead, as most people would assume an Intel processor. That might render the binaries written to get into my system less ineffective.
Then I'd taper down the kernel, removing as much as possible, so that there is less code to exploit. I would definitely hook up to some kind of a service to keep the kernel updated as often and as fast as possible."
However, Kamil Khan, chairman and chief corporate development officer for Softroute, a VoIP telephony company based in Thornhill, Ont., made the decision to limit the role of open source, saying that "the client is under Windows because it is an open standard and offers tremendous security."
Khan, who was at VON Mexico promoting his VoIP service and soft-phone, nonetheless felt that open source could add value to VoIP systems. "The switch is on Linux," he said, "but my company's Vbuzzer product was built on Softroute's own proprietary software, and we wanted open standards partly because of the SIP protocol."
Mario Kreslin, an Aheeva account executive who was also at VON Mexico, feels that going open source for VoIP is one of the main reasons for the company's success. "We can provide all that our customers need, whether for inbound/outbound, recording, scripting or skills-based routing."
"Our solution had to be up to the standards of the industry," said Kreslin.
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searchenterpriselinux.com
June 1, 2005
Canadian firm scores with open source call center
by Mark Brunelli.
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The decision to create a call center based on open source technology turned out to be a profitable one for Aheeva Technologies.
The Montreal-based firm had long specialized in assisting firms choose, develop and manage interactive contact center systems based on proprietary technologies. But when Aheeva began moving forward with plans to branch out and offer hosted call center services, it found that the open source private branch exchange (PBX) Asterisk made the most financial and technical sense.
In June 2003, Aheeva started evaluating various call center systems. Proprietary technologies looked at included those offered by Interactive Intelligence Inc. and Alcatel - two companies that Aheeva had worked with and recommended to customers in the past.
"We turned around and started evaluating products that we know are very good," Aheeva CEO Georges Karam said. "But when we became a customer we realized that they really were a little bit too expensive for us."
Following that realization, Karam and associates decided to "get creative" and take a closer look at Asterisk.
One of the first challenges we had was that Asterisk was a very new product. We weren't sure if it was going to be a robust application," Karam said. "But we realized that there was a lot of potential with Asterisk if we could develop an interface and add some features."
Because Aheeva had considerable in-house expertise and experience with all things call center, the company was able to quickly develop the needed additions, which included the interface as well as predictive dialer and quality monitoring tools.
In November 2003, Aheeva spun off its new sister company, Atelka, a 55-seat call center with full inbound and outbound capabilities and other applications including full digital recording, reporting and online management tools. Today, the call center has grown to 300 seats and counting, and Atelka has signed on 10 customers.
"The predictive dialer allows us to launch thousands of calls at the same time," Karam said. "We also developed another solution around Asterisk for workforce management."
While Asterisk itself is a free download, Aheeva also makes money by packaging the applications it developed around the open source PBX. Karam said that one of the challenges of offering the bundle is that potential customers worry about their support options.
"Some customers are afraid because it's open source," Karam said. "But sometimes it's faster and more reliable having open source products because we have a great community [of users] contributing to these solutions."
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Digium.com
Aheeva case Study
Leveraging Digium's Asterisk to compete in outsourcing
Asterisk-managed Call Centers
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Overview
Montreal-based Aheeva, is a specialist in developing and managing Interactive Business Solutions for Contact Centers. Aheeva provides businesses and contact centers with the tools required to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and increase revenues.
In 2003, the company considered launching a spin-off company that would provide contact center outsourcing services including technical support, sales, newspaper and cable TV subscriptions services, among others. At the time, Aheeva did not have a call center and worked with very expensive, high-end, proprietary, hardware-based Lucent Genesis PBXs. The company was struggling to find contracts where they could deliver a fast return on investment.
Using its vast expertise in evaluating and recommending different call center technologies, Aheeva was in a position to compare different solutions and implement a best-of-breed call center solution.
Challenge
Aheeva's objective was to offer competitive prices. However, it realized quickly that the existing solutions in the market were expensive and would not offer the flexibility required. At first glance, the start-up expense of setting up a call center (based on a proprietary PBX solution) would have cost close to $2 million. Additionally, many companies were finding out that once an expensive standard PBX solution is implemented, it is not customizable, does not provide the level of support needed, and there is often little they could do to improve it.
Solution
In March of 2003, Aheeva discovered Asterisk, the open source PBX/telephony application for Linux. After researching and thoroughly evaluating the application's features and capabilities, Aheeva decided to adopt Asterisk technology in order to develop a call center solution (predictive dialer and quality monitoring tools) to implement in its new Atelka call center.
Implementation
Aheeva needed to simplify the configuration and administration of the existing Asterisk dial plan (Asterisk normally uses text-based configuration files to handle this). Additionally, Aheeva had to expand the ability of Asterisk to handle load balancing over an array of multiple Asterisk servers and switches, without losing track of the channel in which each individual call resides. This improved Asterisk's quick deployment and scalability.
AGI, or Asterisk Gateway Interface, is patterned after the Web's Common Gateway Interface so that the programmer can use his or her favorite programming language to create Asterisk applications, then communicate with Asterisk through STDOUT, receiving Asterisk's response through STDIN.
In the process of adding new features to Asterisk and testing its limits at the time, Aheeva discovered and fixed two bugs within the Asterisk code that show up when you scale it to installations of this size. They submitted patches back to the community, which was well benefited.
Results
In November 2003, Aheeva launched Atelka, a 55-seat call center with full Inbound and Outbound capabilities and other applications such full digital recording, reporting and online management tools. The call center created a new line of revenue for the company. Furthermore, Aheeva was able to dramatically increase the number of contracts they were able to pursue and win. The company's new list of happy customers received the benefit of a reliable technology and a huge cost savings that Aheeva was able to pass along to them. Aheeva now continues to grow its consulting arm adding to its 25 new employees, including 15 engineers. By September 2005, Atelka will exceed 500 call center employees providing a wide range of services.
Asterisk has provided Aheeva with a high level of quality, as well as the ability to customize and upgrade inexpensively. Aheeva now competes with both the quality of big telecom companies, as well as the price of call centers in low-wage areas like India, Pakistan, and South America, saving their money on hardware and software instead of wages.
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Vonmag.com
Advanced Applications of Asterisk
by Doug Mohney.
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"You've got the [third-party applications] that pay the bills and the stuff that's really interesting, and it's rare that they intersect," says Digium (www.digium.com) founder Mark Spencer. "Aheeva (www.aheeva.com) has done a lot in terms of integrating Web services with Asterisk to create an all-in-one contact center solution. They’ve used Asterisk as the core engine in a whole package that gives you everything from managing people to scheduling. It's built from the ground up on Asterisk."
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