Stockley Park, UK, February 24th, 2005 - Aspect Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: ASPT), a leading provider of enterprise customer contact solutions, has announced the successful completion of tests running Aspect(r) Uniphi Suite, an integrated set of award-winning next-generation contact centre applications, on Asterisk(tm), an open source IP-PBX.

Uniphi Suite delivers a wide range of contact centre functionality on open standards-based software and offers a single point of control for viewing and managing contact centre operations. Integration and functionality testing was completed in less than one week, demonstrating the ease of integration possible when existing and emerging technologies are built on open standards.

According to Gartner Research Director Nikos Drakos, "This test demonstrates that products supporting a common set of technology standards provide for more rapid integration and simpler administration."

Tests consisted of the integration of Uniphi Suite with the Asterisk IP-PBX, as well as a demonstration of call handling functionality, including queuing, collecting, routing, prompting and transferring, and advanced speech recognition-driven self-service. Uniphi Suite's use of SIP (session initiation protocol) enabled it to communicate almost immediately with the Asterisk system. Uniphi Suite also supports other technology standards such as Web services, SOAP, VXML, HTTP and SNMP.

"As an industry leader, Aspect must respond to its customers' needs for greater flexibility in solution design and configuration," said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Aspect. "Our demonstration represents Aspect's continued commitment to evolve the contact centre for customers by delivering intelligent applications that are cost-effective, practical and able to address widely varying business needs."

"Completion of the Aspect Uniphi Suite testing on Asterisk is an important milestone for establishing the reliability and flexibility of the project," said Mark Spencer, president of Digium and the author of Asterisk. "This test should reinforce the value of Asterisk, open source and open standards in building next-generation infrastructure and creating innovative new telephony applications."

Aspect will demonstrate Uniphi Suite on Asterisk in Digium's pavilion at the VON (Voice on the Net) show in San Jose, California., March 7-10.

The contact centre industry is shifting towards the use of "open systems," which are widely accepted in the IT world as an efficient means of running an integrated network of mixed software packages within complex enterprises. Contact centres are driving demand for more flexible options with greater scalability-and lower cost. Aspect's Uniphi Suite software allows companies to add a range of advanced contact centre functionality to their traditional PSTN or IP-based PBX environments through an open systems approach.

Aspect Uniphi Suite-Open, Integrated Contact Centre Applications

Aspect Uniphi Suite is representative of the contact centre industry shift towards next-generation solutions with open standards-based software products used to manage all customer interactions. An advanced contact centre environment, Uniphi Suite includes a full set of vital contact centre applications and combines communication routing, data integration, advanced speech, workforce management integration, and reporting and analytics applications into one tightly integrated open standards-based software system. It offers businesses a single view of their contact centre operations and a single point of control for developing and administering business rules that handle live- and self-service interactions no matter where agents or resources are located.

Uniphi Suite supports both PSTN and IP switches, interfaces with existing enterprise applications and provides a centralised cross-media view of a customer's entire experience. Further, Uniphi Suite lets agents manage complex customer interactions across media channels from a single desktop and lets businesses leverage existing investments and the latest technologies to create optimal customer interactions.

Based on Aspect's Uniphi architecture, Uniphi Suite includes the Aspect Uniphi Engine, Uniphi Contact Center, Uniphi Voice Portal and tight integration with Aspect's workforce management software. The following technology components and interactive processes that capture, organise, map, drive and route information and user requests to agents in order to deliver optimal customer experiences are included in the Uniphi Engine: Graphical User Interface, CTI, E-mail Response, Web Interaction, Scheduled Callback, Database Access, Multichannel Routing, Resource Skills Matching, Privilege-based Security, and Reporting & Analytics.

Uniphi Contact Center is an advanced automatic call distribution application offering IP switch support, inter-switch routing and scheduled callback. Uniphi Voice Portal is an advanced interactive voice response application with text-to-speech and advanced speech recognition, leveraging VoiceXML standards.

Aspect Uniphi Architecture-Flexible, Open Framework

Aspect Uniphi architecture is designed to unify the contact centre and the enterprise by integrating the applications that drive customer communications, contact centre and customer information, and workforce productivity-resulting in better insight to business and customer activity. The Aspect Uniphi architecture extends Aspect's vision of delivering proven, multi-product solutions, whether PSTN, IP-hybrid or pure VoIP, while still lowering total cost of ownership and protecting contact centre investments as new technologies and standards emerge. Aspect Uniphi Suite is Aspect's flagship product within the Uniphi architecture.

About Asterisk

Code for Asterisk, originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium Inc., has been contributed from open source software engineers around the world. It supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces. It also supports U.S. and European standard signaling types used in standard business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next-generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastructure. Using the Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX(tm)) voice-over-IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seamlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL addresses and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information.

About Aspect Communications