I had a chance to walk through some of the new features that AT&T will be wrapping around it’s award winning CallVantage service. The most exciting is e-Com that let’s you manage how you take and direct calls. While other soon to be released offerings from other company’s seem similar, and possibly more elegant, e-COM is a tool that will really help people manage incoming and outgoing calling better. Then there is the super duper conferencing they have ready to roll out. In a word, it’s downright impressive. Beyond the elegance of the interface the power of the service that features muting, sharing of files, private voice chats and personal file sharing are all must haves. The speech to text and recording features will put a hurt on numerous companies already in the transcription business, as well as the conference streaming space. Who needs Web Ex when you can have a more powerful, simpler to use product already bundled into your phone service. For companies hosting earnings calls, this platform blows away the offerings from the preferred offerings from CCBN.
AT&T would be very smart to offer their next earnings announcement to analysts via CallVantage new conferencing platform and then have it distributed by EarningsCast, the podcaster.
Last was their open source IP PBX. Thrown together in minutes, it showed how much power is in the AT&T Network for telephony and just what can be done, without any more significant investment.
Clearly AT&T wants to move CallVantage into the Enterprise, and based on what I’m seeing, they have the tools to do it.