MID YEAR REFLECTIONS

By Ari Sonesh, CEO - Time is flying. It is hard to believe we are more than half-way through this momentous year. I am happy to say that we have completed another profitable, record quarter. Beyond the financial indicators, we added two more marquee enterprise accounts headquartered in the US with initial deployments of over 1000 seats each. This further establishes CosmoCom as the dominant vendor and leader in providing technology for call center consolidation ("Consolidation 2.0") projects, and Unified Customer Communications (UCC) applications.

Being the dominant vendor or "800-pound gorilla" in this market segment is an important part of our success. Most buyers are pragmatic buyers who want to minimize their risk and total cost. They believe that buying from the leading vendor is the smarter, safer, and overall lower cost alternative. Indeed, CosmoCom is such a leader, with more knowledge and experience in consolidation and unified customer communications than any vendor. Through years of field experience, we can deliver proven technology and provide the best guidance for these kinds of applications, thus lowering costs and risks.

There are several ways that a customer can implement our technology. He can deploy it directly utilizing his own resources or that of a SI. Or, he can secure it on a hosted basis from one of our Service Providers (many of which are Telcos) either on a dedicated platform or as part of a shared, multi-tenant platform.

On the topic of service providers hosting our technology, our list of Telecom customers continues to grow. I am happy to report that we just added two in the Dutch market alone, including the largest, incumbent telco in the Netherlands (watch for an announcement soon). Furthermore, one of these ordered a large number of seat licenses for two huge enterprise applications in Holland, providing another indication of our technology leadership in the Call Center and Unified Customer Communications space.

Another significant contributor to our revenue last quarter, is PhoneControl in France which has been a valued customer and partner for several years. They manage a hosted multi-tenant platform in France that enables French-speaking telemarketing outsourcers in North Africa to serve the French market. This hugely successful concept is made possible by CosmoCom's highly scalable technology that enables the creation of multiple, secure virtual application environments on one platform.

This quarter we have also closed another major US-based university (name to be announced soon), showing educational institutions to be a very successful vertical for our technology. This is of course not by chance; universities are often distributed by nature, with the need to involve many people from outside of the traditional call center in their customer communications. It may not be obvious, but a major US university can operate tens of different call centers. They benefit tremendously by consolidating their call center technology on a single platform that extends to all corners of the institution.

A similarly successful vertical for us is insurance companies, who also operate in large distributed environments with many call center applications and many employees in contact with the customers. Any organization with a need to communicate with customers in a highly distributed environment is in the "sweet spot" for our technology.

I hope that I have conveyed a little of my enthusiasm about the unique and excellent position CosmoCom is in. It feels so good to be a leader, and to be making a true difference in our industry. In the coming months we will be stepping up efforts to spread these messages far beyond the readership of our CosmoChronicle newsletter, so stay tuned. I will continue updating you as we go!

COSMOCOM PARTNER MTEL LAUNCHES
ON-DEMAND CONTACT CENTER SERVICE FOR THE NETHERLANDS

New Whizper Online Contact Center Services
Help Contact Centers Get Within Whispering Distance of their Customers

On July 10 CosmoCom announced that Mtel, a leading regional telecommunications services company in the Netherlands, had launched Whizper, a new on-demand contact center service based on the CosmoCall Universe all-IP unified customer communications platform.

According to Michiel van Dis, Managing Director of Mtel, "Our customers asked us to deliver contacts past the main entrance, directly to their agent's desktop. With Whizper we can do that for telephone calls, e-mail and web chat via a universal queue. Agents can log into Whizper via VoIP or traditional telephony on our system, so we can route customers to the most suitable agent to handle specific questions."

Get more details in the full press release

COSMOCALL UNIVERSE POWERS
INSTACC CONTACT CENTER SERVICE OF VSNL

Broadens CosmoCom Presence in Booming Indian Contact Center Market

CosmoCom recently announced that VSNL, a leading global communications company and one of India's largest enterprise service providers, has been offering a Contact Center On-Demand service based on its CosmoCall Universe™ platform. Appropriately named InstaCC, VSNL's offering is a feature rich, multimedia contact center solution, rapidly deployed, and paid for on a pay-per-use model, with no up-front technology investment.

These services allow companies to outsource their call center technology infrastructure while maintaining complete control over their staff, operation, and management. Because of the strong cost benefits of obtaining advanced contact center technology on a monthly basis with no capital outlay, and of paying only for what you use when business volume changes from month to month, analysts have projected that at least a third of all call center agents, including those deployed in BPOs, will be using the hosted model within ten years.

Read more about what VSNL has to say about InstaCC

COSMOCOM APPOINTS NEW HEAD OF ASIA PACIFIC REGION

Call Center Industry Veteran Andie Rees Named Regional Vice President

Last month we included Andie Rees as a late-breaking addition to the New Members of the CosmoCom Family with a promise of a more detailed announcement. In June we formally announced that Andie Rees has joined the company as Regional Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan.

Rees will lead CosmoCom's operations in the entire North and South Pacific region, including Japan, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and other major growth markets. He brings more than 20 years of software, CRM and telecom industry experience to the role.

"CosmoCom is pleased to be adding Andie's strength to our growing Asia Pacific presence," said Ari Sonesh, CosmoCom's Chairman and CEO. "His proven leadership skills and his exceptional regional knowledge and experience will help us to leverage our achievements in the area to date. We also welcome his insights as a member of our senior team."

To find out about Andie's valuable experience read the release
 

GET THE ABERDEEN VIRTUAL CALL CENTER REPORT SPONSORED BY COSMOCOM

Companies are constantly searching for innovative ways to maximize the efficiency of their call centers while at the same time reducing overall costs. In a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen, and sponsored by CosmoCom, over a third of Best-in-Class (BIC) survey respondents (35%) have seen greater than a 10% improvement in customer satisfaction upon the implementation of remote agents. In fact, over half of all survey respondents identify remote agents, those who work outside the centralized call center office and connect through the internet, as an upgrade they plan to implement within the next 24 months.

The pressure of increasing call center efficiency while reducing costs was identified by a majority of survey respondents as the top reason for implementing remote agents, with 55% of BIC companies citing this as the top reason for utilizing remote agents. The need to support a distributed workforce was identified by 45% of BIC companies as the second pressure causing them to consider implementing remote agents. On the other hand, average companies cited supporting customers across different time zones as the number two pressure, with 28% indicating this on the survey.

BIC companies are addressing these pressures in a number of ways, including the utilization of call routing and issue routing technologies as a way of guiding customers to the appropriate support agent.

The research shows readers that implementing remote agents for call centers results in higher levels of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. It also provides the results that BIC companies have seen across key metrics after employing remote agents and compares these companies to the Industry Average and those who have not yet pursued a similar strategy.

Download a copy of the report.

CONNECT WITH COSMOCOM AT UPCOMING EVENTS IN AUGUST

August and September will be busy months for CosmoCom on the road, especially in the Americas. We'll bring you more details of the September events (including ACCE, Call Center 2.0 and more) in the August CosmoChronicle, but if you are planning your  August activities around your summer vacation, why not consider attending VoiceCon in California and/or the RightNow Summit in Colorado.

Starting August 20, you can see CosmoCom technology in action and talk to our knowledgeable staff about unified customer communications and your call center consolidation needs at VoiceCon in San Francisco. We'll be in booth 730 so make sure you stop by. If you are considering call center technology you'll want to make sure you talk to the leader. You'll be glad you did.

The following week, we'll be joining RightNow Technologies, at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, as a silver sponsor of the RightNow Summit.  RightNow recently sponsored CosmoCommunity 2007 and we're looking forward to working more closely with them as companies of all sizes are realizing the value proposition of our complementary technologies. If you are planning to attend the Summit, make sure you find one or more of our executives during the exhibition and networking activities so we can discuss your unified customer communication needs.

NEC AND COSMOCOM TEAM FOR BRAZIL SHOW(S)

On July 5, CosmoCom and partner NEC teamed up to participate in the 2nd IP Contact Center Seminar promoted by Brazil's IT Inside magazine. The one-day event took place at the Hotel Melia Jardin Europa in San Paolo, Brazil with an audience of over 130 high-level managers and executives.

CosmoCom's Luciano Dolenc was among the first of the plenary speakers, following the keynote, and captivated the audience with a compelling presentation on Consolidation 2.0. The topic peaked the interest of many of the attendees who flocked to the NEC/CosmoCom table after the general sessions to discuss the topic further and get more information.

Also following his address, Luciano was interviewed on the topic resulting in a great article in the on-line version of the magazine (in Portuguese).

"All-in-all it was a VERY positive event with a lot of energy. Interest in IP Call Center and Consolidation 2.0 was very high," reported Luciano, "I am looking forward to continuing the momentum in September when we will be exhibiting with NEC at CONAREC in Sao Paolo."

SOUTH AFRICAN PARTNER INTELLECA MAKING HEADLINES

While prepping this month's CosmoChronicle we came across an "In the News" story that we feel is worthy of its own headline. South Africa's Intelleca has been a reseller and integrator of CosmoCom technology for quite some time, but has also become a full-fledged and successful service provider of Contact Center On-Demand as well.

Contact Industry Hub in the region recently featured a wonderful story on how Intelleca has designed and delivered South Africa's first fully hosted, virtual contact centre on demand (CCOD) turnkey solution at Telemed, one of the country's leading medical aid administrators.

The contact center is being run out of both Telemed Pretoria and Telemed Germiston, and is the first of its kind contact centre solution in the country. Based on technology from CosmoCom (which Intelleca represents as the Master value-added reseller (VAR) and integrator in South Africa), the contact center is unique in that there is no hardware at either of the customer's sites. Rather, all the software and hardware required to power the contact centre is provisioned from Intelleca's hosting facility in Centurion.

Learn how and why Telemed chose Intelleca's on-demand contact center solution for their enterprise.
 

 BITS & PIECES: SOME VOIP FACTOIDS

Upgrade Call Center by Adding Remote Agents
According to a recent Aberdeen report, 35% of Best-in-Class (BIC) companies have seen a greater than 10% improvement in customer satisfaction since implementing a virtual contact center. They are also 3 times more likely to see a reduction
in average call duration upon implementation of remote agents.

In the survey of 150 companies, it was found that over 35% of BIC companies currently have seen a greater than 10% improvement in customer satisfaction upon implementation and highlighted the need to increase efficiency and reduce costs as the top pressure for implementing remote agents.  Download the full report.

NEW MEMBERS OF THE COSMOCOM FAMILY

CosmoCom Americas

Karen Johnson is the new Executive Assistant -- Americas Sales & Marketing at CosmoCom HQ Karen joins us after five years with Austin Meeting Services, where she worked as an Event Planner/Meeting Coordinator. She is no stranger to CosmoCom. While at Austin she was instrumental in the planning and execution of CosmoCommunity 2006 and 2007 and her experience will be invaluable to the success of future events.

Kayecy Johnson has joined the CosmoCom HQ finance team as our new Staff Accountant. is a graduate of the City University of New York and spent the past two years at Citigroup where she was the Accountant for their foreign exchange & equities trading group. She was involved with all aspects of their financial accounting and reporting, while also mentoring new employees. Kayecy worked part time while attending school including a position at AXA Financial.

CosmoCom Israel

Boris Ouretskey joins CosmoCom as CS Development Team Leader in the Israel R&D department. He brings more than eight years of software development experience. Prior to CosmoCom, Boris was involved in the development of a new SIP based IP-PBX at Tadiran and was as a senior developer in charge of various PBX to CTI integrations at NICE. He started his career at the Israel Air Force and holds a B.A in Computer Science as well as a MBA in business administration from the Technion.

Shirley Perry will be working as the CosmoCom Israel office administrator, taking care of the day to day office administration work such as travel, purchasing, HR, etc. In addition to her office administration responsibilities Shirley will be supporting the support team as the Israel "TAC coordinator"

TRADESHOW NEWS: COMING ATTRACTIONS

	VoiceCon Fall August 20--23, 2007 Moscone Center San Francisco, CA, USA www.voicecon.com/fall/ See CosmoCom in booth 730
	RightNow Summit2007 August 27-30, 2007 The Broadmoor Hotel Colorado Springs, CO, USA www.rightnow.com/summit/ CosmoCom is Proud to be a Silver Sponsor of the RightNow Summit
	CONAREC 2007 September 4-5, 2007  Hotel Transamérica Sao Paolo, Brazil www.conarec.com.br Visit sponsors NEC and CosmoCom
	Call Center 2.0 September 10-12, 2007 Los Angeles Convention Center Los Angeles, CA, USA www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/call-center/ See CosmoCom in Booth CC 331
	ACCE September 10-12, 2007 San Diego Convention Center San Diego, CA www.ACCEicmi.com See CosmoCom in Booth 220
	Unified Communications Conference at Fall VON October 30 - November 1, 2007 Boston Convention Center Boston, MA, USA www.unifiedcommunicationscon.com See CosmoCom in Booth 928
	RECORDED WEBINARS
	View recordings of our Webinar events including "Consolidation 2.0", "Hosted Contact Center for Outsourcers", "Contact Center On-Demand" and "Telecom Customer Care"

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	TECH SUPPORT UPDATES
	CosmoCom has replaced SupportNet with a new improved support site, for customers and partners, called CosmoCom Online Technical Support. You can find the latest documentation, Hot Fix bundles, Microsoft updates that have passed QA for CosmoCall Universe deployment, discussion groups and more. In addition, you can now access your support tickets online. If you have not yet obtained your secure login information, please contact your CosmoCom representative or send support an email.

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