VoIP – Hosted AND Premise-Based?

January, 2010

If current trends are anything to go by, premise-based installations are losing favour and we are headed for hosted and cloud-based nirvana. But do current trends provide a reliable forecast?
Maturity in VoIP infrastructure and technology in recent years has brought us a long way down the road to true voice and data convergence. As a result, if current trends in applications and increasingly data storage are anything to go by, premise-based installations are losing favour and we are headed for hosted and cloud-based nirvana. But do current trends provide a reliable forecast?

Looking around, we see that the substance of the ‘premise vs. hosted’ debate has shifted. Users no longer ask whether the hosted VoIP model will work. Technology that enables voice and data convergence is here. It works. Period.

We are reminded of the evolution of the debate over offshore versus domestic outsourcing: it became apparent that the two were not mutually exclusive and that the solution was often a mix of both according to particular circumstances, and ‘right-shoring’ emerged. This is now mirrored in the ‘premise vs. hosted’ debate. Again it has become apparent that they are not mutually exclusive and therefore a hybrid mix of the two is often the right answer.

We have moved into a new phase – ‘premise AND hosted’ (‘right-hosting’, anyone?) – which asks exactly which elements of a VoIP deployment should sit in the cloud and which should be premise-based. We vendors should offer as much assistance as possible to potential users in coming to the appropriate ‘right-hosting’ mix because the answers are often not clear cut. Decision makers often have different viewpoints in areas of security, quality and customer satisfaction which give rise to strong opinions on the method of storage and access to applications.

For example, customers without advanced infrastructure or technical staff might use hosted servers for both applications and storage. But users dealing with sensitive customer information may not trust hosted storage, and see the premise-based model as delivering the best possible quality for customer communication.

It seems that, for the time being at least, VoIP deployments will employ a mixture of cloud- and premise-based elements, with hosting often being employed to complement rather than replace premise-based systems, e.g. immediate failover to a hosted platform if the inhouse system goes down, or overflow to hosted when extra capacity is needed.

But vendors need some humility, too. Expect convergence to favour a hosted model, but don’t be surprised if as a result of human & other factors, purely premise-based systems continue to have a healthy life.

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

Flexible Contact Center Software

Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale

  • Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

    CCaaS for subscribers – global service​, with no upfront costs

  • Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners

    Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software

  • Contact Center Platform – Enterprise

    High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid

Blended Media Desktop

Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace

Work Anywhere

Browser-based tools, no software installation required

Customise, Localise, White Label

Design all user interfaces to individual requirements

Integration via APIs

‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps

World Class Development

Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

Capabilities

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.

All Media Channels

Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended

Agent Multi-Tasking

Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel

Dynamic Workforce Management

Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels

Predictive Dialing

Best-of-breed performance under compliance

Optimised Inbound Routing

Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service

Agent Scripts

Help agents achieve and maintain excellence

Voice and Screen Recording

See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

Analytics and Data Feeds

Measure and evaluate performance at every level

IVR, Bots & Conversational AI

Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers

Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

Modules

Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance

Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

Sytel AI Dialer™

Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules

Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels

Softdial Publisher™

Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

Sytel Global Compliance™

Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

Solutions

Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications

By Business Type

Enterprise

A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale

Small/ Medium Business

Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves

By Industry

Customer Service

Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Debt Collection

Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

Sales & Telemarketing

Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

Healthcare

Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care