Derek Top of Opus Research recently spoke with Anakam and has highlighted the voice biometrics based authentication that Anakam is providing for West at Home on the Opus Research Voice Biometrics blog.

The growing market for home-based virtual agents gives contact center service providers flexibilities in staffing - for instance, to shoulder seasonal call spikes - while still maintaining high levels of customer service with an educated and motivated workforce. But one concern with such a highly distributed at-home agent solution is to make sure the person checking in for work is the actual person contracted with the service provider.

To ensure higher levels of security, West Corporation has purchased Anakam's comprehensive suite of products, including voice biometrics, to provide authentication mechanisms in verifying the identity of home-based agents. West at Home, with more than 15,000 virtual agents, plans to use the "Anakam Identity Suite" to provide strong authentication of virtual private networks (VPN) between home-based agents and their platform. The product suite enhances West at Home's current two-factor authentication by offering customers the ability to deliver a one-time passcode via phone, email or voice biometrics.

The partnership with Anakam - whose roster of customers include government and healthcare organizations utilizing identity proofing and verification technologies - underscores West Corporation's commitment to provide secure, multi-channel communications. While the announced partnership focuses on the authentication process of internal West at Home agents, the company says the deployment will expand over time to include customer and client-facing solutions.

Previously, Opus research interviewed Brent Williams, Anakam CTO, at their Voice Biometrics Conference in New York.

At Opus Research's Voice Biometrics Conference 2010, Brent Williams, CTO of multifactor authentication specialist Anakam, observed that voice biometrics solutions providers had, perhaps, done themselves a disservice by concentrating so heavily on financial services. When the worldwide financial chill hit all banks, voice-based authentication projects were the unintentional victims.

By contrast, Williams noted, his company remains very bullish on the potential for voice authentication to play an important role in supporting multifactor authentication requirements for truly large scale deployments, where people have to have great confidence in remote authentication. Anakam has several opportunities in mind in areas where his company has had success: authenticating "extremely large scale user-bases for consumer, patient, and citizen-facing applications in e-health, e-government, e-banking, and e-commerce."