Traditional Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) Peripheral Gateways (PGs) are commonly used to interface the ICM with a third party Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). The PG monitors call and agent activity on the ACD and communicates with the call router for real-time and historical data reports as well as for dynamic call routing. The PG also works in conjunction with the CTI Server to allow software applications to both monitor and control agent states and telephones (to perform screen pops for example).

With the ARS PG, the ACD functions are performed by Cisco's Unified ICM rather
than the 3rd party ACD. The ACD functions as a PBX and is only
required to provide connections for agent phones and execute IVR
scripts as requested by an ICM script. The agents can log in and perform call control using the agent phones supported by the PBX (hard phone support) or by using the Unified ICM desktop (soft phone support).

Bucher + Suter Software offers the following ARS and ERS gateways:

• b+s Enterprise Routing Service (ERS) Gateway for Aastra Intecom
• b+s Agent Routing Service (ARS) Gateway for Aastra Intecom
• b+s Agent Routing Service (ARS) Gateway for Siemens Hipath 4000
• b+s Agent Routing Service (ARS) Gateway for Alcatel 4400