Vendor Profile
Alston Tascom:
Vision to Reality, End-to-End Contact Center Solution

The compelling story of Alston Tascom is one of leadership, vision, engineering, and customer satisfaction.  It is a story of one man's vision that defined an industry's technological base and of another man's vision that revolutionized it.  Those two visionary leaders are Russell Alston and Wayne Scaggs.

A privately held corporation headquartered in Chino, CA, approximately thirty miles east of Los Angeles, Alston Tascom is a true American success story.  The company designs and develops digital contact center industry solutions, featuring system hardware, software, and computer telephony integration.  The Tascom Evolution system is an end-to-end contact center solution.  Tascom controls call flow from the Telco's "demark" to the agent's screen and beyond.

Corporate History: Alston Tascom, Inc. traces its company roots to the early 1950s.  Telecommunications pioneer Russell Alston, developed the "Blue Alston Box," a call accounting system that became an industry standard.  It was installed in telephone company central offices worldwide.  The system also was used to measure call activity in many major hotel facilities and other institutions.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Alston introduced a variety of telecommunications products and developed a close working relationship with the telecommunications giant, AT&T.  Alston's company continued to grow, occupying a large industrial facility in Duarte, just north of downtown Los Angeles.

In the late 1970s, executives from AT&T approached Alston and asked the company to develop a "paperless" messaging system.  AT&T planned to expand its services to include messaging for its business customers.  After significant development on the product, AT&T decided not to enter the messaging industry and released Alston from its proprietary development obligation.

Tascom Legacy Introduced: Alston continued to develop the messaging system independently and the Tascom product was released in 1979.  "Built to Bell Company specs" was the hallmark of Alston's entire product line.  The Tascom Legacy System was installed at sites throughout North America and the Caribbean.

Considered by many to be the "Cadillac" of the teleservices industry, the Tascom product line continued development throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s.  With its "Bell Company standards" design, the product was often referred to as "bullet-proof" and as the "workhorse" of the teleservices industry.  The system's reliability and up time were greatly appreciated by the system's loyal users.

With a large and influential group of users, Tascom's feature list became increasingly sophisticated.  The development of Tascom Gen 7 was a significant collaborative milestone for the Tascom Users Group (TUG).  The increasing popularity of "order entry" activities for teleservices agencies led to the development of tools to facilitate companies who were advertising their products and pledging, "operators are standing by."

Founder Retires: After nearly thirty years of telecommunications system development, Russ Alston announced his retirement and the sale of the company.  The company grew into multiple divisions with numerous product lines, including the Tascom division.  Tascom system development continued into the early 1990s.

A New Beginning: In 1995 Wayne Scaggs, a long-time company field engineer announced his acquisition of the company to the Tascom Users Group.  At that meeting, Wayne Scaggs pledged to reengineer the Tascom product "from the ground up."  With his intimate knowledge of the system and the teleservices industry, Scaggs added a number of "next generation" engineers to his team of existing Tascom engineers.  He retained the services of several of Alston's key customer service and administrative employees, each of whom now have more then twenty years of service with the Tascom customer base.

During this development process, Tascom's primary competitors in the industry continued developing their products, which also had been built using their own proprietary hardware, proprietary operating systems, flat databases, and early 1990s PC technology.

Tascom was "dormant" in the marketplace during the mid-1990s and the competitors gained key market share for new installations.  Almost every Tascom user, however, remained loyal to the company and their Tascom system.  This "dormant" development period worked to Tascom's advantage as a new era in PC operating systems, servers, and development tools became available.

"Open" Development Strategy: Tascom's engineering staff made an early, strategic choice that would propel the product to the industry forefront.  The Tascom team chose to build the entire system on the newly introduced Microsoft SQL database and Microsoft NT operating system.  Tascom's development strategy is focused on three important principles:

• Open architecture: all standard Microsoft operating systems.

• Open database: all information stored in standard ODBC-compliant databases.

• Off-the-shelf hardware: no proprietary hardware required anywhere in the system.

More than a half decade later, Tascom is the only major TAS industry developer still able to claim this open development strategy.  Tascom also claims the title as the first in the industry to implement the following technological advances:

• TCP/IP Network

• Windows workstations

• Windows NT Server

• Microsoft SQL Server

• Delphi development front-end

• Microsoft Development Partner

• Intel Communications & Dialogic Partner

• Point & Click Account Scripting & Forms Design

• Visual Basic Scripting for sophisticated scenarios

• Billing interface to QuickBooks

• Interactive Voice Response

• Text-To-Speech

Enter the Digital Age: Tascom entered the digital age in 1999 with the release of the Tascom Evolution system.  Tascom Evolution is a series of digital communications servers:

• Excalibur for sites of up to twenty-four agent stations.

• Leviathan for sites of twenty-five agent stations and larger.

• Saber for sites seeking a front-end digital communications server using legacy agent stations or other third-party systems.

The Evolution system's open architecture allows a site to easily expand from an Excalibur or Saber system to a Leviathan system.  Also, the maximum number of agents and trunks can be further expanded into multiple servers and from a "stand alone" site to a "distributed" multi-site network of contact centers.

The system was co-developed and customized for both contact center and telemessaging operations by engineers from Alston Tascom, Inc. and Braxtel Communications of Dublin, Ireland.  The Tascom Evolution system replaces the Tascom Legacy switch.  It significantly expands agent and telephony capacity, while introducing multiple new system capabilities and features.

The Tascom Evolution system supports digital T1 spans with both DIOD (Direct Inward and Outward Dialing) and ISDN/PRI (Primary Rate Interface) signaling protocol.  Analog loop-start lines are also supported by the Evolution.

Primary features of the Tascom Evolution system include:

• Rules and skills-based Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

• Fully programmable Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

• Unified voice mail

• Unlimited accounts, voice mail boxes, greetings, and messages

• Email (with .wav attachment), alpha pager and digital pager notification

• Unified voice logging (call recording)

• PBX functionality with all standard 2500 type phone appliances

• Inbound, outbound, and blended agents

• Preview, progressive, manual, and speed dialers

• Pre-set and programmable report generation

• Ring to hook call reporting and billing data

• Single site (standalone) and multi-site (distributed) configurations

• Single and multiple server configurations

• Scalable from four to over two hundred agent stations

• Scalable from one to twenty T1 spans

• Standard operating systems, open database and off-the-shelf hardware

Internet Interaction: Alston Tascom, Inc. has continued development to include a suite of Web and Internet tools and features to meet client needs and demands.  Tascom's Internet and Web developments allow clients to view, edit, and add messages and to transmit messages to fax, alpha, or email addresses.  Client Web access also provides the ability to review, update, and deliver on-calls, locates, and databases.  Clients can also run on-line reports to their specifications.

Accounts linked to specific Websites give agents the ability to view and interact with on-line knowledge bases and client forms.  Tascom also offers a Web-based appointment scheduling system, www.AppointmentsOnCall.com, where both contact center agents and their clients can simultaneously set and reschedule appointments in a secure and customizable interface.  Another Tascom Web interface is their text chat and Web browser page push capability allowing agents to collaborate with Web surfers and assist them in navigating or purchasing client products on the Internet.

Mobile professionals can interact with Tascom enabled contact centers with a variety of wireless Web applications designed for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled telephones.

Tascom's Future: The success achieved by the staff at Alston Tascom has made the company a recognized player in the contact center industry.  Tascom Evolution is the system of choice for telemessaging services planning to expand into the contact center marketplace.  The company has adapted and even thrived under competitive market conditions.  The drive to turn vision into reality continues in the company's unyielding spirit to succeed.  Tascom's engineering staff is constantly developing innovations to fulfill the dreams of visionaries throughout the contact center industry.

Contact Information: Alston Tascom, Inc, 13512 Vintage Place, Chino, CA 91710.  Phone: 909-548-7300 or 866-4TASCOM; fax: 909-517-3670; email: info@alstontascom.com, Website: www.alstontascom.com 

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