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If you enjoy paying for dialer maintenance, if you think that’s a great way to spend money, then you’re not going to be interested in this, and you can skip over to the sports page now.

Okay, for the rest of us, we’re aware, as LiveVox (News - Alert) officials say, that contact centers are by and large milking the most out of aging systems. Bad economy and all, don’tcha know. No funding this year for new systems. Keep the old ones together with spit and duct tape. Hey at least we’re not dropping our support and maintenance contracts like those guys eating the seed corn over there.

Before you do anything as drastic as dropping support and maintenance altogether, bear in mind that in so doing, you may be violating client SLAs or business continuity-disaster recovery mandates. But yes, we agree that paying a large premium for talking to tech support sounds increasingly ridiculous, what with the consumerization of IT.

“So why are contact centers still shelling out cash?” LiveVox asks. You know the answer: Inertia. It’s how we’ve always done it. Vendors fiercely protected that source of revenue because it’s a high-margin cash cow.

Some contact centers are dropping maintenance but using hosted systems that do not require a CapX or other support costs as one way to avoid such payments. “In terms of numbers, even adding a pay-as-you-go hosted model is still substantially less than total maintenance expenses and provides even better reliability,” LiveVox officials observe, probably correctly.

Look, as more and more contact centers adopt cloud platforms, there’s going to be a growing realization that paying the extra capital for the right to call tech support kind of doesn’t make much sense any more. “With the cloud, call center technology has evolved past the days when paying extra for maintenance was standard operating procedure,” LiveVox says.

So what are you going to do about it?

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. 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.

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