Today Jacada and Avaya announced that they are entering into a joint marketing agreement. Avaya is going to be offering several key Jacada tools to their global customer base of (mainly) large call centers. That's good news for Jacada, which will instantly acquire a critical channel into one of the most important and lucrative markets in the callcenterverse.

Click the player on the right to hear David Holmes and Brian Carmichael discuss the deal and how it further defines this burgeoning integration market as a whole.

It's also good news for Avaya, which has cherry-picked a solid, working technology in the form of Jacada's WorkSpace agent desktop integration system. Avaya's going to roll it out through their Consulting and Systems Integration group (CSI), a services team.

This is a natural, and to our mind, interesting match because while it (of course) serves the two companies involved, it also has positive ramifications for call centers in general. Avaya needs no introduction to the call center market - they are one of the largest and historically most important providers of core infrastructure to centers around the world. By some estimates they are embedded in as many as 30-40% of the largest centers globally. And not just because folks are still using Avaya ACDs - over the years, they have successfully become a full-provisioning provider of a wide range of hardware and software to call centers, including IP technologies and through the heady CTI days of the '90s, consulting and integration services.

At the largest end, these are call centers that have had the most critical need for connections between the applications that run facing the agent, and those that run behind the scenes in other departments - billing, shipping, CRM, customer analytics apps. That makes them the companies (and centers) most likely to have the most complex agent desktop environments. And that is where Jacada comes in.

Jacada has, over the last few years, excelled at creating an integrated environment for the agent desktop. They caught our attention a little more than two years ago when they debuted a product called Fusion, which seamlessly organized the various applications that crossed the agent's desk with a non-invasive approach that brought it accolades from major clients like West (the giant outsourcer).

Why is the agent desktop so critical? Because when confusion occurs there it ricochets through the customer experience, slowing down interactions, raising costs, degrading customer sat, increasing training time - essentially it causes a bottleneck that's entirely avoidable. But it's only avoidable if you look at all your call center data streams (and many of your non-call center streams) as a whole, as an organic system. What we've always liked about the Jacada system is that it takes that holistic view and cuts the Gordian knot right where it's tightest: at the point where the agent has to switch back and forth between as many as a dozen different applications, sometimes during each customer interaction.

So Avaya, with their approximately 35% market penetration, by adding Jacada's Fusion and WorkSpace to their services portfolio, do two things. They boost the profile and prospects of Jacada, of course. But more important, they validate the proposition that the agent desktop is a mess that can and should be fixed.

Avaya's Brian Carmichael (Global Contact Center Practice Lead for CSI) told us that "I think quite frankly going forward when Avaya leads this type of analysis, I think it's going to be broader than just the things that jacada would typically look at. We would also look at some of the other areas that could be optimized within the contact center."

That no knock on Jacada at all - what he's saying is that this joint step is the the beginning of a move that's going to allow call center optimization professionals to look at every aspect of operations and technology and figure out how to make them work better. Case by case if need be, center by center. But ultimately, thanks to the enormous reach of Avaya's installed base, across the industry as a whole. That's the big news here.

Part of that change is that it's going to involve people beyond the call center. Jacada's David Holmes, Executive VP for Global Marketing: "The early meetings we're having jointly with Avaya are very quickly getting to people outside the people we'd typically talk to. We're having early C-level meetings ... and certainly bringing other influencers into these conversations. All of that helps to validate the ROI and the value proposition for what we're doing."