Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Echopass for its Continued Leadership in the North American Hosted ACD and Hosted APO Contact Center Marketplace

Company leverages its vast experience, innovative product suite, customer-centricity and strategic excellence to lead the market

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the hosted automatic call distribution (ACD) and hosted agent performance optimization (APO) markets of the contact center industry, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Echopass Corporation with the 2012 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Share Leadership. For the second consecutive year, Echopass has sustained and expanded its position as the market leader by leveraging their expertise with innovative, complex, and flexible applications to meet exacting performance, reliability, and security requirements.

The hosted contact center vendor landscape in North America is competitive with more than 50 solution providers coming from various core competencies. The competitive set of providers include communications service providers, BPOs, best-of-breed, and full-suite hosted contact center providers, OEMs, and systems integrators. Echopass has garnered and accelerated its leading position in this market.

One reason behind the success of Echopass is its expertise in large enterprise deployments. Echopass serves leading firms in several industry verticals, including financial services, retail/consumer goods, hospitality, healthcare, transportation, and government. The Echopass client roster is comprised of some of North America's most well known enterprises with the largest and most sophisticated contact centers.

"Echopass has set itself apart from the other hosted providers by delivering significant competitive advantage to its clients within the large enterprise market," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Brendan Read. "Echopass supplies complex multi-tenant hosted and complex hybrid customer applications and solutions. They also provide in-depth integration and customization, which is all performed with speed and business continuity options. Echopass clearly understands the enterprise customer and its exacting needs."

The Echopass portfolio of solutions include full datacenter and system-wide redundancy, back-up storage for historical capture, and the Echopass Symmetry™ active-active capabilities to distribute load, as well as API sets and extensive integration libraries. Echopass provides full end-to-end management and responsibility with 24x7 support that is guaranteed through SLA service availability and reliability greater than 99.95 percent. The company is recognized and referred to by its clients as true partners.

In terms of infrastructure and technology, Echopass provides best-in-class architecture. The firm has a layered, service-oriented, multi-tenant distributed architecture that is comprised of proprietary and sourced software stacks, which work together through the Echopass Multi-Tenant Abstraction Layer. Each client has unique records with IDs and each client's software can be upgraded and configured independently of other clients for maximum security provisioning.

"Echopass continues to develop, refine, and expand its suite of applications, both anticipating and responding to customer needs," notes Read. "The firm is thorough in solution planning, selection, integration, and implementation. Echopass understands that functionality, flexibility, reliability, and security are paramount to its customers."

An example of the company's ongoing development was the 2011 launch of EchoPlace; the largest cloud-based technology partner network focused on the contact center industry. EchoPlace enables enterprise clients to have a choice regarding how best to optimize their customer service through innovations from leading suppliers with solutions built on the open Echopass platform. Using EchoPlace solutions, enterprise clients can choose to implement an entire portfolio of integrated solutions at once, or adopt an evolutionary path that allows for the integration of existing assets with the Echopass platform.  EchoPlace is a simple and proven way to integrate technologies from market-leading companies, with the confidence of comprehensive Echopass support and solution validation.

The company utilizes Genesys contact routing and CTI, combined with other select best-of-breed partner components, from industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft, Nuance, and Verint. It has integration with all CRM applications, including from Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SalesLogix, and Sugar CRM, as well as with back-office systems.

"Significantly, Echopass has not taken the marketplace for granted and continues to evangelize the cloud-based model while expanding its solution set and capabilities through the EchoPlace Partner Network and continued innovation such as the delivery of EchoCallBack, which enables callers to decide when and how to be contacted instead of remaining in queue," said Read. "Its well-deserved reputation, validated by the successful results of its customers, will encourage other enterprises to investigate and ultimately switch to a cloud-based contact center delivery model."

Echopass has been evangelizing the market through website content, compelling case studies, conference and trade show participation and sponsorship, webinars, videos, white papers, meeting customers and prospects, and engaging with leading industry analysts. With customer retention and delight becoming more critical than ever in today's ultra competitive environment, Echopass' strategy reinforces its overall solution set value proposition and its reputation. Echopass will continue to benefit as the company recognized for introducing so many newcomers to the cloud.

Overall, Echopass' experience with large enterprise customers, effective execution, all-in-one suite, exacting security and privacy protection, and strong brand name has enabled Echopass to dominate the hosted ACD and hosted APO markets in North America for a second consecutive year. In recognition, Frost & Sullivan is pleased to present the company with the 2012 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Share Leadership.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing the highest market share within its industry. The award recognizes the company's leadership position within the industry in terms of revenues or units, as specified.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

About Echopass Corporation

Echopass is the #1 Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of cloud-based contact center solutions to large Enterprises. Since 2000, Echopass customized solutions have served Enterprises with up to 20,000 agents across multiple sites and complex application and infrastructure environments, while satisfying the most stringent industry compliance and security requirements. Echopass solutions are fully integrated, flexible and scalable, and require no capital investment or ongoing maintenance. Privately-held Echopass, backed by venture capital firms Canaan Partners and New Enterprise Associates, is a recipient of numerous industry awards for innovation and customer service, including the Red Herring Top 100 Companies Award and multiple Best Practices awards from Frost & Sullivan. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. For additional information, please visit www.echopass.com or call 1-888-622-5345.

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