Alvaria has announced the rebirth of the Aspect brand.
However, Aspect won’t offer a CCaaS platform or on-premise contact center technology this time around. Alvaria will still do that.
Instead, Aspect will encapsulate Alvaria’s workforce engagement management (WEM) offering, formerly known as the Alvaria Enterprise Workforce Suite.
In doing so, the brand will act as a subsidiary for Alvaria, reaching new prospects with its standalone WEM platform: the Aspect Workforce Enterprise Suite.
That suite will include contact center workforce management (WFM), quality assurance (QA), reporting, and gamification solutions.
Darryl Kelly, Chief Strategy Officer at Alvaria, helped piece together the vision for the standalone offering and reviving Aspect. Now, he’ll lead the brand as CEO.
Before Alvaria, Kelly held senior roles at several prominent CX tech providers and advisories, from RingCentral and LivePerson to Accenture and Bain & Company.
That experience should hold the first-time CEO in good stead, and Kelly seemed excited by the next step in his career and Aspect’s long history. He stated:
Given we’re doubling down on innovation with this next chapter, we want to honor where it all began, so bringing the Aspect name back seems like a natural fit.
“With the workforce landscape changing significantly, corporations can rely on us to help them build more resilient, engaged, and agile frontline teams that can thrive in an always changing world.”
Despite its three-year market absence, Aspect remains a staple name within the contact center industry, with the company founded 41 years ago.
That foundation came when it – then under the name “Aspect Communications” – deployed the first-ever automatic call distributor (ACD) system for Continental Airlines in 1973.
Fast-forward to 2005, Concerto Software acquired Aspect Communications for $1BN, calling the new entity “Aspect Software”.
Unfortunately, it fell into bankruptcy a little more than a decade later. That triggered a switch to CCaaS with the launch of Aspect Via in 2016, which included workforce engagement management (WEM) tools.
Over the following years – and the Noble Systems merger in 2021, after which “Aspect Software” became “Alvaria” – those WEM tools evolved into a mature WEM suite.
By spinning this out, Alvaria hopes to take advantage of the changing workforce landscape Kelly highlighted and reach new prospects.
Those prospects may leverage another CCaaS or customer engagement CRM solution as their core contact center platform but wish to utilize more advanced WEM capabilities. Aspect will fill that gap. Indeed, as more enterprise tech vendors enter the CCaaS market with lightweight WEM offerings, the timing seems ideal for Alvaria to spin out a standalone WEM offering.
Moreover, with rumors suggesting that NICE has made a move for Playvox, there are few specialist vendors that offer both contact center WFM and QA within a unified suite.
NICE is one, but Calabrio and Verint are the only other prominent global players.
As such, Jim Davies, Co-Founder and Executive Partner at Actionary, believes that there is significant potential to unlock within the WEM market. He told CX Today:
The relaunch of Aspect, a well-known name in WEM, could mark a renewed focus and much-needed innovation in this important but often underappreciated space.
Additionally, with a standalone WEM offering, Alvaria can get its foot in the door of many more contact centers, which it may hope to expand into CCaaS over time.
While the brand has failed to reach the radars of many analysts since its 2021 inception, Alvaria remains a big business, with 750,000 employees worldwide leveraging its products.
The company will hope to boost that number further, now the Aspect Workforce Enterprise Suite is generally available.
