The Cisco Contact Center Express Computer Telephony Integration Protocol (UCCXCTI) provides for Cisco partners to develop custom 3rd party agent and supervisor softphone applications similar to what is provided by the Cisco Agent Desktop (CAD). Applications using this TCP/IP socket based message protocol can receive event information for Unified CCX agents and calls and can provide agent and call control. In addiiton, applications can receive configuration information as well as statistics information on a realtime basis.