EasyRun intros "PBX Agnostic" enterprise contact center solution

EasyRun, a provider of multimedia contact center solutions to firms such as Coca Cola, the Dallas Cowboys, Pizza Hut and Viacom, is announcing a "PBX agnostic" contact center solution bundled with a full-blown Asterisk IP telephony infrastructure. The EPICAcce (Pronounced "EPICAce") solution is the company's first move into offering its own branded solution to the enterprise space; its contact center offerings have been sold by the likes of 3Com and ShoreTel.

With EpicAcce, EasyRun is coming out from behind the curtain of its OEM heritage to provide an affordable, open standards-based product for SMBs up to 300 people. The use of Asterisk and other open source/open standard pieces is proving to be both attractive and relatively secure.

"It's a good time to release a new product," said Mike Rose, EasyRun VP of marketing. "Now people are willing to take more risks, they're willing to work with Asterisk." Not that there's anything wrong with the open source IP telephony platform going on 10 years old. "There are a lot of people offering Asterisk solutions today," Rose said.

EpicAcce uses a 2U off-the-shelf Asterisk IP PBX appliance from Xorcom and puts its call center software on top of the full PBX. A basic configuration starts at around $5,000 and goes up as customers add more seat licenses and additional functionality, such as voice recording and cradle-to-grave reporting.

Customers can choose to use the Asterisk IP PBX as their primary phone system or simply drop the box in beside their existing legacy or IP PBX solution for a contact center solution, as the "secret sauce" for EpicAcce is its ability to easily talk to other PBXes. If customers need IP phones, EasyRun is currently supporting snom's line of IP handsets and is working on qualifying other handset manufacturers.