One of the more interesting developments of the past year has been while much of the headlines in the contact center solutions community has been focused on organizations of all sizes moving to the cloud, another big trend has been the positioning of all of the vendors in the community to make sure they give contact center customers options. And, by options what is meant is to provide enhanced contact center functionality that is a function of where any given customer is in transforming their contact centers and what their unique circumstances are regarding such issues as what might need to remain on premise versus possibly moving everything to the cloud.
Indeed, the hybrid solution option has emerged as a popular one and that is a trend that is more than likely to grow into 2015 and beyond. An illustration of this was the announcement that Seattle, WA-based cloud infrastructure provider Spoken Communications, which specializes in contact center virtualization solutions, signed an agreement with leading contact center solutions supplier Avaya to offer a hybrid cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution.
Avaya Cloud Services powered by Spoken entails a multi-tenant cloud platform that enables companies to seamlessly transition to next-generation contact center capabilities. The cloud platform is designed specifically to support hybrid situations so that companies can use existing premises-based infrastructure while evolving to a full suite of native cloud-based contact center applications.
The announcement of the partnership highlighted that Avaya and Spoken will cross-sell the virtualized capabilities of the Avaya Cloud Services powered by Spoken. Customers will have three options for adoption which are as:
The partners note that each application is available for integration à la carte, eliminating the need for any enterprise to discontinue its current applications such as call recording or Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI). They add that the platform’s flexibility extends to call recording and screen capture applications, which customers can customize to partial percentage or 100 percent capture. In short, there is no need to as the saying goes, “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
“Clients are seeking ways to transition to the cloud while maintaining their legacy infrastructure and applications,” said Spoken CEOHoward Lee. “The fact that customers can integrate anything from a single application such as cloud call recording to the entire application stack gives customers the flexibility they’ve been asking for while offering a low-risk place to start.”
“Contact center customers will benefit from the security, scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing model of Spoken’s hybrid cloud service,” said Joe Manuele, Vice President of Global Service Providers, System Integrators and Cloud at Avaya. “We believe this cloud solution offers customers the level of data security and flexible scalability they need as they transition to cloud.”
The latter citation hits on an important point. Data security concerns about the hosting of sensitive customer data has been an obstacle for any type of cloud consideration by many contact center administrators. The ability to host sensitive customer data such as call or screen capture recordings locally on the client’s premises via a hybrid solution addresses these concern which is why such solutions are popular. And, the other reason for the popularity is the benefits of the going to a services model.
It will be interesting to watch the industry analysts reports as to how much traction hybrid gets as a total of contact center solutions revenues this coming year. It will also be interesting to see just how everyone fills in what may be missing pieces in their offering portfolios.
It should also be noted that if you wish to see and hear more about what is going on with Contact Center Solutions you can join the industry conversation at ITEXPO East, being held January 28-30 at the convention center in beautiful and warm Miami Beach, FL.