Alvaria resurrects Aspect brand

Aspect is another “name brand” in the CX market with a storied past as the company got sold and merged throughout the decades.

Aspect Communications was formed in 1973 and was considered a pioneer in ACD (automatic call distribution) technology. In 2005 it was acquired for $1 billion by Concerto Software to become Aspect Software, still focused on contact center applications. Although it secured a strategic partnership with Microsoft in 2008, which included a significant investment, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2016 due to—you guessed it—heavy debts, and was acquired by PE firm Vector Capital in 2019. Then in 2019 it merged with Noble Systems to form Alvaria.

Perhaps realizing Aspect’s brand worthiness and street cred, Alvaria decided to bring it back to life. The workforce management suite, anyway.

Obviously, Alvaria didn’t do this for the sake of CX nostalgia. I think this is Alvaria adjusting to customer demands. It is harder to sell a whole CCaaS package when a customer already has a WFM solution, and vice versa, especially in today’s highly competitive CX landscape.

You used to be able to count the number of WFM vendors with just one hand. Now it’s just about every CCaaS vendor as well. Incumbent WFM vendors started to build their own CCaaS solutions, and CCaaS vendors saw the benefits of including in-house WFM. There are also numerous partnerships which these vendors can integrate between their WFM and CCaaS platforms, should a customer decides to pluck and choose.

I see this spinoff as a positive move by Alvaria. Aspect can attract more customers just seeking enterprise WFM solutions. Alvaria will still profit as well as getting its foot in the door to sell its CX products. On the flip side, Alvaria can also offer better pricing CX solutions to potential customers already having WFM.