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LiveVox Warns of Slippery 'Hybrid' Talk for Cloud Contact Centers

TMCnews Featured Article


August 16, 2011

LiveVox Warns of Slippery 'Hybrid' Talk for Cloud Contact Centers

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


If you remember the old Burger King ad campaign “Have It Your Way...” then a) you’re probably a bit older than you’d like to admit, and b) you understand what LiveVox officials mean when they say on their company blog that “the market has developed a lot of flavors of cloud -- public, private, hybrid, etc.”


And you also understand when they say that hey, in fast food joints, all flashy advertising aside, “your food doesn’t always look as fresh as the picture behind the register, and a lot of ends up tasting the same.”

Yes, the cloud can deliver specific features for the contact center, such as capacity planning by bursting to handle any inbound/outbound call volumes on demand, as LiveVox (News - Alert) officials say: “It can simplify global call routing with a simplified network topology -- without requiring contact centers more hardware and put it between them and the cloud.”

As they put it, the goal of any contact center is to “match up the right agent, customer and channel to get positive outcomes.” And what would be great would be if you could adjust your labor costs to exactly match your need, wouldn’t it? Hard to do with multi-site installations, isn’t it?

That’s one reason companies use cloud contact centers, to get that seasonal elasticity -- more agents when you need them, fewer when you don’t. But as LiveVox says, be careful about the slippery terminology some vendors use:  The word “hybrid” is “marketing’s favorite word to Spackle over one thing to make it look like another.”

The blog post does a good job giving quick rundowns of the different options:

Multi-tenancy. A single-tenant product has the same 1-to-1 scalability issues as site-premised regardless where the server that drives it is co-located. The shared approach of multi-tenancy enables greater real-time scale and, if matched with a true N+1 redundancy at all levels, better reliability -- “non multi-tenant products simply cannot deliver the cost efficiencies owed to you by cloud.”

Distributed pool architecture. Architecture that uses pools of identical network and server building blocks increases scalability, fault tolerance and reliability. Hence the system can be designed to easily re-route service if any one piece of equipment fails.

IP/MPLS. Several call centers have transitioned to VoIP/MPLS. Carrier IP/MPLS has the benefits of more secure and reliable service, with QoS monitoring and the like.

In June TMC’s (News - Alert) Rajani Baburajan wrote that LiveVox, which sells private VoIP Cloud and integrated contact center applications, announced it is offering a cloud-based switching tool for multi-site contact centers.

The new LiveVox Private VoIP Cloud enables contact centers to execute multi-site call routing without site-based switching or expensive and limited “intelligent” networking hardware, according to company officials.

“The Private VoIP Cloud is the culmination of a 10-year effort to develop and refine our platform,” said Louis Summe (News - Alert), chief executive officer, LiveVox.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

 


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 Juliana Kenny







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