What’s in the cloud (and what’s not) and why you should care

This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.

Apple’s recent announcement about its new cloud service—and the subsequent attempt by pundits to once more explain cloud technology—made me realize that this might be the time to revisit this subject in the context of call centers. Hosted call centers are often equated with on-demand call centers in the cloud. Let me clear up some confusion on this subject from a business-case perspective.

Hosted call centers were initially seen as a bane for businesses that did not wish to lock up capital in call center technology or didn’t have the operational staff to manage the complex implementations of a sophisticated call center. Why not move your call center operations to the data center of a hosting vendor and focus on your core competencies? Seems to make sense, right? However, hosted call centers turned out to falsely promise to cure IT headaches. Hosting implies dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it on an enterprise's behalf. There are no scale or call center virtualization advantages and hence no real cost savings. Frequently, hosting solutions actually add additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to an enterprise's call centers.

On-demand contact centers, in contrast, are deployed as software as a service (SaaS) in the “cloud.”They are built from the ground up as multi-tenant software applications. These virtual call centers use web services that reside on an inexpensive shared infrastructure and scale simply by adding servers (think about how Google scales). On-demand contact centers typically offer browser-based user interfaces for call center agents and supervisors, reducing their desktop footprint and associated support costs. On-demand contact centers commonly make extensive use of open-source technologies and commercial off-the-shelf networks, storage, and servers to reduce acquisition and call center operations costs. They also wrap their applications with service management software and utilities to reduce monitoring, diagnosis, and break-fix costs.

True on-demand contact centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or feature set. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions. For an example of a SaaS virtual contact center solution, check out Transera.