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			Business Research: Customer Performance Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Chordiant, Ciboodle, Cincom, ClickFox, eglue, Enkata, Envision, HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova Solutions, InQuira, KnoahSoft, Merced Systems, Portrait Software, ResponseTek, Symmetrics, Tealeaf, thinkAnalytics, Aspect
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Over the last two years the contact center market has seen considerable consolidation, and 2009 has continued the trend as Aspect announced it had acquired niche contact center performance management vendor AIM Technology. Ventana Research views this as recognition that operating as a standalone contact center performance management vendor is very difficult. Our benchmark research shows that very few companies have yet to see the business benefits of investing in a specialized product to monitor the performance of their centers; rather, they choose to continue using Excel, an in-house-developed system, or, in a small number of cases, their enterprise business intelligence system. AIM Technology thus now has gone the same way as companies such as Informiam (acquired by Genesys), Latigent (acquired by Cisco), and Performix (acquired by Nice).

From Aspect’s perspective this seems at first like a strange move as it already has a performance management component within its PerformanceEdge product. However, this component came by way of an OEM deal with Merced Systems and while it has delivered several sales, the licensing arrangement restricted Aspect’s ability to modify its offering to respond to demands from its customer base. Aspect has therefore chosen to proceed by acquiring AIM, whose product is based on the same technology platform as PerformanceEdge and so will be easy to integrate and support globally. Existing AIM customers should find the transition fairly painless as most are current Aspect customers and the company will continue to support their existing deployment until they choose to migrate to the new product. Going forward, all customers will benefit because of Aspect’s stated commitment to contact center performance management and its greater number of trained support staff.. In trying market conditions, companies need to improve the performance of their centers and to do this they need better information and analysis that can help pinpoint where improvements need to be made. Ventana Research believes this acquisition will make this more possible.