Big companies are a bit weird sometimes. Take ISD, the Internet Sales Division. They want to implement CRM 11.5.6, starting with 20 agents and going up to 5000 agents eventually. Now, you'd think that since we're all part of the same big company we'd just give them the licenses and support they need. But that's really bad for accounting purposes. Without proper accounting you can't break down profit and loss for each department and you have very little idea of how the company is doing financially.

Hence when ISD looked around, we were just another company and had to compete with other solutions. Beats me how we won -- we probably threw in some incentives and discounts (nobody ever pays retail for business software) -- but we did get the contract. The first hurdle is telephony platform. The pilot center uses old Aspect switches, most of the rest of ISD uses Lucent switches (they have lots of little call centers). Naturally, eventually they want to tie everything together and do call and data transfer between the call centers.

We only support enterprise call and data transfer via Intel CT Connect or Cisco ICM solutions. They don't want to use ICM because it's very expensive (ICM is a call center solution, the same as us, whereas CT Connect is just a telephony middleware). Unfortunately, our Aspect solution only works with ICM, because the CT Connect-Aspect project crashed and burned. They also don't want to commit to a new switch for their little call center, which would be like $1 million (Lucent, now Avaya, switches are pricey but in my experience they're really good).

Ok, we can't do CT Connect-Aspect because we don't have enough resources. So they agree to help pay for two more developers to work on an Aspect solution. But now they want us to develop for some Aspect middleware. Well, we won't be able to do enterprise call and data transfer with two different middleware solutions. Fine, they still want it this way. Talks drag on and deadlines slip but eventually preliminary contracts are signed and we hire one developer and are in the process of hiring the other developer.

But wait! Out of the blue our Product Management team comes up with another solution. Lucent has an add-in card that allows the switch to treat any phone as a dumb agent phone. Basically it works by forwarding calls. A customer calls into the Lucent switch to a virtual extension. That extension is mapped dynamically to a phone. The Lucent switch automatically calls the agent phone and joins the two connections. If the agent wants to hold the call or transfer the call, that's all done with the Lucent switch. It can hold the call and for a consultation call it can call you again when the consultation call is placed. The agent only has one line so the Lucent switch has to keep calling the agent whenever a new line is used.

It's a bit cludgy and yet brilliant. It only relies on getting connect and disconnect events from the agent phone, which is almost always true since the phone company takes care of that signalling. A lot of switch resources are used (double the normal number of PSTN connections, for one). But you can use this for at-home agents, as long as they have an Internet connection for the softphone commands that are sent to the switch.

So that's what we'll probably use for ISD. It's a good interim solution that requires almost no extra cost above the cost of the actual CRM costs. It also means that we don't develop for yet another platform, and we'll most likely get to keep the developer we hired, though maybe not the other developer since she hasn't been officially hired yet. Sure, they're pretty much using this sophisticated Aspect switch and phones and dumbing them down, but at least it works for now and they will move to Lucent switches eventually.

And that's how one deal was done. A lot of negotiations and back and forth and a changing target for developers. Even for an internal customer. That's one of the differences between business and consumer software. Consumer software is "if you don't like it, tough". Business software is "ooh, you're going to pay us $1 million? Sure, we'll costumize it for your needs!"