Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center SaaS Software: Not Just Hosted, ASP Stuff
Hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of call centers in recent years have switched to the SaaS (News - Alert) (Software-as-a-Service) model of delivery. No doubt you've run into friends at cocktail parties and have asked them so, what's so good about SaaS -- isn't it just today's ASP, hosted software?
They might not have been able to give you a coherent answer, as they had a fistful of the shrimp dip and their fourth Manhattan at the time. We're just on our first beer, so we can give you a good, clear answer.
SaaS, according to a good summary from workforce management software vendor Monet Software, has numerous advantages over the traditional hosted or ASP models of the past. Yes these offerings are often confused but, not addressing the fundamental differences, have a huge impact on your call center business.
The traditional hosted model, Monet officials say, is simply hosting a client server application on a server at the vendor’s site. The vendor then provides an application -- that was not originally designed to be hosted -- over the web, oh maybe with a few changes, and delivers it to each customer via a single, dedicated server.
You can count on the fact that this lacks a multi-tenant architecture and requires separate servers and installations for each customer. It's much more costly and less scalable, and requires support for multiple releases -- resource intensive, yes. Confusingly, vendors who sell on-premise software may even offer a hosted model for on-demand options and often misleadingly call it SaaS.
Your proper SaaS-based model uses a totally new multi-tenant architecture that was designed to deliver web-based applications. It focuses on fast setup, low operating costs through shared services, appropriate security for web-based deployment and performance and scalability through scaling of computer resources -- you might have heard this called “elastic cloud computing.”
The advantage here is that it ensures available computing capacity when you need it and only when you need it, lowering the overall cost.
Bottom line, just because it's offered through subscriptions online, doesn't mean it's SaaS. Accept no imitations.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Patrick Barnard