L'odyssée de Corebridge
11 May 2009
The ChannelNews website in France interviews Raoul Mattei, Corebridge's General Manager for Continental Europe. A translation follows. For the original article about Corebridge please follow this link: L'odyssée de Corebridge, Channel News.fr website
The Corebridge Odyssey
11.05.09 - Dirk Basyn
Corebridge has signed a partnership agreement with Microsoft for its OCS Gateway Server solution. A deal for the Anglo-Saxon offshoot of a company that was born in the laboratory of France Telecom.
No one is prophet in his own land. This old saying is especially appropriate in respect of Corebridge's odyssey. In the 'nineties, development agreements between IBM France and France Telecom gave birth to a gateway for hardware and software that enabled the remote monitoring of telephone calls. Becoming the property of both Bull and Integro, the product suffered as differences between the two companies emerged.
So its creators went in search of capital investment, which they found in Britain, the Middle East and Hong Kong. The investors, asked the developers to release a 100% software solution. They did and on 1 January 2004, the Corebridge company was established in London with an office in Hong Kong and R & D based in France.
In 2007, its commercial arm was reactivated in France. In the same year Corebridge was one of the first companies to be invited to join the Microsoft Accelerator Startup Program, which enables it to receive software and support from the software giant. This partnership has assisted the creation of Corebridge OCS Gateway Server (COGS), a software gateway that leverages the remote call control capabilities of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
Red Herring Global 100 Award
Very intrigued by this product, a Microsoft team from Seattle visited Corebridge in 2008. The Global 100 Award from Red Herring in January 2009 helped convince the Redmond publisher to sign a partnership agreement with Corebridge. The product is now ready to be distributed. The goal is to become a preferred solution.
"All Microsoft partners can deploy our solution in the form of a COGS server. This is the equivalent of an Alcatel gateway, but as a modular software, it is irrelevant who made your PBX or what communications infrastructure you have. COGS can provide disparate telephone environments with different levels of technology. Not everyone is geared for IP," said Raoul Mattei, Corebridge's General Manager for Continental Europe.
No initial investment software
COGS requires no initial software investment. The customer need only pay an annual fee for support and maintenance. From their workstations, users then have access to all the benefits of unified communications (email, initiation of work flow activity triggered by call activity, conference call, voice mail, SMS ....).
"Being deployed in France by Microsoft may allow us to invest in neighbouring countries such as Italy and Spain. We already have two clients in Switzerland," said Raoul Mattei, a former IBM sales manager. Corebridge in France is back to square one in some ways, but under much better auspices.
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