Converged is a relatively new company, but the people in it, sadly, aren't quite so young. We've been doing this sort of thing for a while now. We built some of the first converged networks in Australasia. The first ones were data networks because that's where convergence started twenty years ago (although we do think we were present at the first trial of packetised voice in Australia, circa 1985). We built some of the first and biggest packet networks in the region (anyone remember X.25?) and we saved our clients a motza (literally millions of dollars). Admittedly that was easier to do back then. Then we moved on to converged voice and data networks. Still saving lots of money, but it was getting harder.
Along the way, we built the odd phone system and contact centre. This was in the days when voice contact centres and screen pops were considered pretty cool. But we have never been happy with just cool. We envisaged cool and useful. So we designed one of the first telephone systems that was fully integrated into the IT systems of a business. In fact it was to drive the core business processes. That took a bit of doing when TSAPI was about all we had to work with.
Then deregulation happened and we pretty quickly realised that we were going to have to get into the game to compete and keep saving our clients money. So we started building service providers. We built one of the early Wireless Internet Service Providers in Australia, and an international telephone call business. We also helped some serious global telcos with their Intelligent Networks.
Then Internet telephony came along, closely followed by IP telephony (subtly different - it's all about the Quality of Service). So we moved into IP telephony, working with the global leader in business phone and contact centre systems, helping develop their government business. We came across a fair bit of old fashioned centrex style services, and figured there had to be a better way in this day and age. So we developed what we think was one of the first hosted IP business telephony and contact centre offers in the region. We also fixed up a few of the "teething problems" in some early implementations of IP telephony.
Along the way we found some pretty cool, locally developed, multi-channel contact centre software. It did everything - voice, email, SMS, web chat, IM, you name it. Fully integrated with the Microsoft™ environment out of the box. Totally open, with user API's and wizards. You could even build applications in Visual Basic™, for heaven's sake. We saw a demo of building a soft phone in VB in 3 minutes. Where was this when we needed it ten years ago? And then a light came on. We could use this to build the best, most efficient contact centre service in Australia. So we did.
But that is just the beginning. Because of the openness, flexibility and customisability of the platform we have built, the real power comes in how we tailor and integrate the service to your business. In the custom applications we build using our platform and our tools. And how we integrate them into you business systems to make you more efficient. Our aim is to make your life easier.
There aren't a lot of people in Converged. There never will be. We're not a carrier. Never want to be. We are a service provider. We have some pretty powerful partners, and some of them are carriers and some of them are pretty big. The service we provide is to bring together the people, the systems and the experience to deliver to you the best hosted business phone and multi-channel contact centre services in the country. Guaranteed.
