Somewhere along the line, however, a fundamental shift pulled the rug out from under this telephony-centric view. It's now all about the data. I laugh whenever someone raises the old question of "should it be known as a call center or a contact center?" It's really a customer data center, the one point where any outside person searches (and hopefully finds) the precise information they need to complete a transaction.

In the marketplace for call center products and services, the shift from telecom to data has been tectonic. Let's reflect on that shift a little. Look at the "call recording" companies. They began with a telephony core, but over time their emphasis has (quite sensibly) shifted to become managers of the meaning of each call. The stuff that goes on inside the call - whether it's agents following procedures or customers exhibiting frustration - has been married to the call's consequences through a logical extension of the technology. What we've been witnessing (no pun intended there) is the maturation of call center management into something more akin to customer experience management.

I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to sit down in separate meetings over the last few weeks with execs from Witness, Verint and NICE. All three companies have taken separate paths toward a common point. They want to (need to) offer tools that do everything. That's not a knock - there's a coherent logic to putting all the agent-facing and customer-facing tools under one software roof. As we started reporting a couple of years ago, the whole technology landscape was beginning to smear together into a meta-category that we dubbed "agent development" - this, on the theory that if you were a niche provider of software for call centers, there was very little reason why you wouldn't want to add a feature to your tool that provided 90% of the functionality of the tool in the next sector over. Training tools meld into assessment tools; workforce management and performance management blur together; forecasting and schedule adherence glom onto training and monitoring and coaching and so on.

This has been a good thing, I think, because actual on-the-ground call center professionals are less likely to get bogged down in the technology and focus more on the operational results. They get to spend more time thinking about creative ways to express value, about new metrics that better represent the work they do and that let them manage more effectively. From where we sit, we know that those pros want to learn about the results end of the equation. I see that in the statistics about what articles here people read and which ones they don't.

After talking to Witness, Verint and NICE about all sorts of things, and after taking a few weeks to digest the news that two of those three are merging, I come away with a sense that although there are now fewer players in the overall market, there are still islands of innovation. I don't think that fewer big players will stop niche players from coming into their own. I was in Miami last week for our Call Center Demo show. What I saw there was that companies big and small are working to fill in the holes in the call center toolbox. For example, I saw several really interesting pre-hire assessment tools that hadn't been on my radar, but now surely will be. (More about them in future articles.) I heard a lot about ideas for dispersing agent workforces using all sorts of platforms, from hosted tools to centralized setups. I saw interesting approaches to data security, customer verification, speech recognition applications....

Lately when call center pros get together en masse there's a lot more to talk about than company M&A issues. I think we've reached the point where anyone's tool, whether niche or broad suite, is replaceable at almost any moment by someone else's. That's a benefit of open platforms and standardized parts. Call centers (I think) recognize this reality. They know that they are the engines driving feature development. This is a big change from the days when CTI or CRM or some other new technology would descend on the marketplace and be pushed by vendors in a feature arms race.