The early years
Altigen has a rich history of innovation and industry firsts. The original concept behind our company was to create a standards-based business phone system that could be self-administered by the IT department.
In 1996 this was quite revolutionary, bucking the black box, proprietary model which had existed for nearly 30 years (Lucent, Nortel, Siemens, etc.). Our solution was also the industry’s first Microsoft based phone system, and continues to utilize Microsoft technologies at its core today.
In 1998, we expanded our solutions portfolio by developing an integrated suite of robust contact center applications. This allowed thousands of businesses, which were previously unwilling to spend the exorbitant dollars required for proprietary contact center solutions, to make significant improvements in how they communicated with customers. That same year, we introduced one of the world’s first PBX systems supporting Voice over IP. While this is the de facto standard today, at the time this was a major step forward for companies, allowing them to finally integrate communications for distributed locations while significantly cutting their telecom expenses.
The evolution continues
We’ve continued to develop the applications and tools required by sales and service driven organizations to stay ahead of the competition. Over the last ten years this has proven especially beneficial to the financial services market, with more than 1,400 banks and credit unions deploying our technology to improve communications with their customers. Similarly, in other industries, our ability to integrate with database and customer relationship management software has significantly improved the ability of our customers to provide great service.
In the last decade Microsoft has made significant inroads into the Enterprise Voice and Unified Communications market. Leveraging this trend, we were one of the first companies to deliver integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server with our integrated contact center suite. As Microsoft evolved OCS into Lync then Skype for Business and Office 365 Cloud PBX, we’ve continued to enhance our solutions to complement Microsoft’s messaging, collaboration and conferencing capabilities through our natively integrated, in house developed applications.
Today
Along with our continued product enhancements, we’ve also extended our solutions delivery models. In addition to our traditional perpetual license delivery model, we also now offer our solutions as fully managed cloud-based services. Our hosted services offerings include our MaxCS PBX solution, our MaxACD contact center solution and, more recently, Hosted Skype for Business.
Our flexible delivery models allow companies to choose the deployment option which best suits their business requirements today, instead of requiring customers to make significant front investments or being locked-in as technology continues to change.