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Jacada and Avaya have announced a joint marketing agreement that will see Avaya bring Jacada’s desktop products to market. Some observers might ask, so what? The contact center industry is awash with announcements of partnerships, takeovers and strategic alliances. But this is different, first and foremost because it is a marketing alliance between Jacada and the Avaya professional services group responsible for contact centers, not another technical agreement to make products easier to integrate. As such, Jacada will benefit from the much wider exposure Avaya already enjoys  – especially at the executive level – and Avaya will take another step up the value chain. Today, Avaya delivers calls to the agent desktop and stops there. Under the new agreement, it will be able to support companies looking to improve the way those desktops work.

The professional services piece of the agreement is key, since improving the desktop is not simply a matter of installing new software. Rather, the issue for companies is twofold: making agents more efficient by enabling new interaction-handling processes at the desktop and helping them become more effective by making it easier for them to access the data they need to resolve interactions. Jacada does both, while also taking a pragmatic approach to developing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Over time, as the Avaya professional services team learns to execute the services necessary to support these changes, customers should benefit from having a larger pool of experts available to support them. For now, we understand Jacada will take the lead until the services team is ready to stand alone. Ventana Research believes over the medium term this will benefit both companies by generating more sales revenues but more importantly, in the long run it will increase awareness of the need to improve the agent’s desktop so that customers get better service when they call companies.