San Mateo, CA and Melbourne, Australia – January 11, 2005 – Contactual™DBA, the leading provider of on-demand contact center solutions, and NEC® Business Solutions (NEC) in Australia today announced that NEC will be hosting, selling and managing a hosted contact center, dubbed Agent99, licensed from Contactual (formerly White Pajama). 

“This relationship is consistent with our strategy of partnering with global leaders in business services to grow our market and reshape the expectations for contact center pricing and delivery.  NEC Australia is clearly the dominant player in that geography, and this is why we’ve formed this relationship,” said Mansour Salame, Founder and CEO, Contactual. “We are greatly expanding the reach and distribution of our technologies through this relationship, and, we believe, our initial product focus on the small-to-mid-sized contact center will fit perfectly in an already impressive portfolio at NEC.”

Today’s announcement is the culmination of several months of market-entry planning and intra-company engineering development in Australia and Silicon Valley.  Both companies are optimistic about the growing worldwide demand for hosted contact centers.  According to industry analysts, the worldwide market for hosted contact center services is expected to grow to several billion dollars by 2008.  With a dedicated product site (www.agent99.net.au), and a fully-supported sales and marketing effort already underway, a handful of NEC customers in Australia are already using Agent 99. 

According to NEC, the decision to add a ‘hosted’ solution to the company portfolio was clear.  

“NEC has been supplying a range of premise-based contact centre solutions to the Australian market for many years,” said Andre Szep, Assistant General Manager of NEC’s Solutions Group. 

“After extensive market testing and evaluation of the Contactual solution, we are confident that Agent 99 gives NEC the best solution available for small-mid contact centre customers.” 

NEC has a significant channel partner program and is currently in negotiation with a number of carriers and partners interested in implementing Agent 99.  The production platform is now being built ready for an Australian launch in April this year.

About Agent 99
Agent 99 is the smart business tool; a hosted, on-demand contact solution from NEC that empowers your people to deliver service excellence, through any channel of customer contact – phone, web enquiries, web chat or email. With the smarts of Agent 99, anyone in your business can be transformed into an Agent – all they need is Internet access and a phone line. Agents will be up and running in next to no time…ready to take orders, provide after sales support, respond to marketing campaigns, and most of all, manage all of your customer relationships.

About the Contactual OnDemand Contact Center
Over the past five years, Contactual has developed a feature-rich on-demand contact center product that leverages state-of-the-art technologies, like VoIP.  Contactual has identified the key features that any call center needs, and delivered, without lowering our industry-leading standards for reliability, scalability and ease-of-use. Feature examples include, but are not limited to:
•        Multimedia Interaction Router/ACD
•        Multimedia switch
•        Real-time reporting and monitoring
•        Call recording and monitoring
•        Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
•        Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
•        Chat
•        Co-browsing
•        Knowledge Base
•        Self Help
•        Web Administration

About NEC Business Solutions
NEC has had a dedicated Australian presence since 1969, designing solutions that are not only world class, but in many cases world first. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the NEC Corporation, Japan, NEC is a global R&D centre and major exporter in its own right.

NEC Business Solutions has taken its proud Australian heritage and global expertise to become a leading innovator and supplier of integrated voice and data solutions including Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, contact centres and managed services.  We have become the trusted partner to 30 percent of Australia’s top 500 companies and have consistently been ranked as Australia’s number one overall IT&T provider*. Our proven market leadership provides customers with the confidence and assurance that they are partnering with a reputable and reliable partner.

About Contactual
Contactual was founded in 2000 as White PJ, Inc., with the goals of reducing costs and eliminating the risks companies face when deploying customer service automation solutions. The White PJ customer service automation center quickly established itself as an award-winning solution for small and medium call centers. In 2004, White PJ founder and CEO, Mansour Salame, embarked on a successful business strategy that reinforces the company's key product advantages of scalability and reliability, targeting vertical industries that deal in mission critical data and services.  With hundreds of companies using Contactual products, the company has matured and emerged as the leader in On-demand Contact Center products.  To match the new business strategy, a new company name (Contactual) was selected in the Fall of 2004 to communicate the core value of the product. For more information, visit www.contactual.com.

*Contactual is a trademark of White PJ, Inc.  Contactual is the “doing business as” name of White PJ, Inc. NEC and NEC Business Solutions are registered marks of NEC Corp., Agent 99 is a trademark of NEC Corp.