In 1995, Dr. Jon Anton of the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University started benchmarking call centers with the help of graduate students. The first annual study, sponsored by IBM, attracted over 500 participants and yielded the industry's very first best practice statistics. The following year the study was sponsored by Ameritech. By 1999, Purdue University recognized that this initiative was adding tremendous value to the call center community and decided to outsource it to BenchmarkPortal to enable it to reach its full potential. BenchmarkPortal now has responsibility for providing benchmarking services to the contact center industry.