As cloud communications rises in adoption, much of the emphasis to date is on the operational and capital expense savings that can be achieved for contact centers. Simply stated, many of the other advantages are not front-and-center in the decision-making process for CXOs considering migrating to cloud.
Coming back from a recent industry conference, industry analyst Ken Landoline, a principal analyst with the Current Analysis (News - Alert) Business Technology and Software group, made some key observations about the advantages of the cloud being highlighted by exhibitors and the perceptions among enterprises and SMBs with mission-critical contact center applications. Landoline tracks the enterprise unified communications and contact center (UCCC) markets.
At this stage in the cloud phenomenon, sales people are pitching the cost benefits of cloud-based services. But they need to dig deeper if they want to realize the full potential cloud can bring their businesses.
One area where businesses can benefit from cloud-based services is implementation within their disaster recovery plans. But at this particular conference, that was a moot point, Landoline observed.
“What surprised me was how seldom the issue of disaster recovery came up as a driver of cloud-based services,” he wrote in this blog post. “However, when I questioned suppliers of cloud-based services on the use of disaster recovery as a sales stimulator for mission critical applications such as the contact center, they unanimously agreed that there was a tremendous appeal to that story but implied they simply had not begun to capitalize on that yet as a way of enhancing sales.”
The disaster recovery sales pitch, in fact, is a valuable consideration, especially given recent world events and potential outage threats for businesses. DR as a driver of cloud will even be putting into motion the next wave of market growth, according to predictions by Landoline.
While the contact center market is slowly migrating to cloud, over next five years analyst Ovum (News - Alert) predicts worldwide compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of premesis-based contact center agent positions to remain relatively flat at below about 2 percent.
For hosted contact centers, however, analysts are painting a much more positive picture with projections of a CAGR from 2009 to 2016 of up to 19 percent for hosted agent positions.
Looking ahead to the next 12 months, Landoline predicts disaster recovery becoming a much more significant force in driving the cloud contact center services market, based on customer interest and the providers’ need for another sales tool to add to their repertoire.
One of the biggest hurdles in creating a solid business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) and document storage plan is the belief that there’s no way around adding redundant physical servers – and their associated capital expense costs – to your back room, according to Michael Feil, director of cloud solutions for Logicalis (News - Alert).
If you’ve heard that argument in your own organization, it may be time to reassess your BC/DR strategy, he recently told Cloud Computing magazine. The idea that disaster recovery can be sold as a value-priced service managed in the cloud is not new, but it’s quickly gaining traction among savvy CIOs and IT managers keeping a close eye on their budgets.
Click here to read the “Five Reasons to Consider the Cloud in Your Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan.”
Edited by Braden Becker