The CyberCall open source solution offers businesses a functionally rich contact centre solution at a lower cost than other products on the market. This solution is well suited for both small and large organisations, says Almarie Leimecke, director of customer services at Atios Cape Town office.

Its licensing costs are Rand-based and substantially reduced due to the solution operating off an open source platform. An added benefit is the fact that the system is not dependent on pricey third-party imported middleware.

According to Leimecke: The solutions competitive advantage is intelligent routing on an open source platform, with no third party products to support. It reduces the IT spend and migrates an organisations call centre solution to a cost-effective and stable open source operating system.

CyberCall offers a full suite of computer telephony functionality, she adds. It is a scalable, modular and switch-independent solution with the functionality of a best-of-breed call centre solution, including PABX, intelligent routing, multimedia interactivity and integrated voice response (IVR) capabilities, she claims.

It is also intended to provide real-time and historical reporting of all call centre metrics to support workforce optimisation. CyberCall is built on open standards for easy integration with all back-office systems, including Nortel and Siemens solutions. Although the current database runs off an SQL platform, there are plans to migrate the database to an open source platform in the very near future.

CyberCall is a first of its class Atio-owned product. It was initially built in the 1990s and ran off a Microsoft platform. It was modified in 2006 to operate in conjunction with the Asterisk open source PABX solution, the company says.

Atio has already implemented CyberCall within the Metropolitan Health Group. There was a quick turnaround in the installation to ensure that the Metropolitan Health Group call centre could go live with CyberCall in June, the company says.

The Metropolitan Health Group was looking for a cost-effective enterprise solution for its contact centre whose business was growing towards increased call volumes. It did not want to be burdened with high licensing costs, and had already begun moving their back-end and administration servers to a single HP Unix platform. With CyberCall, Metropolitan Health Group gained a single platform, open source solution with single vendor support, says Leimecke.