About hosting
Hosting...is an innovative business model where the telephony service is provided over the web -customers do not own (or pay) for any hardware or software but rather just for using it. Sometimes known a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in a similar way to salesforce.com, in NewVoiceMedia's case it is more appropriate to use the expression 'Telephony-as-a-Service' as the end user is not using software as such, but pre-integrated modules that fulfil applications ranging from simple IVRs to full blown contact centres.
Background
The majority of today’s Contact Centres are office-based, consisting simply of a room full of agents linked to a single set of wholly-owned (by the end user) Customer Premise Equipment (CPE). The CPE systems include ACD (automatic call distributor), IVR (interactive voice response) and sometimes CTI (computer-telephony integration.) CTI, a factor of growing importance to Contact Centres, links the telephony to business applications such as CRM (customer relationship management) and WFM (workforce management). Historically, CPE in general (and CTI in particular) has been affordable for only the largest corporations – prices in excess of $500,000 for a 100 agent centre are not uncommon.
"The upfront costs of a non-hosted solution are often dwarfed by the hidden costs."
As mentioned above, the hardware for a tradition call centre is prohibitively expensive for all but the largest call centres. It is capex intensive and requires management decisions to be made at the highest corporate levels as to the long term requirements for the centre: invariably the system is configured to accommodate more agents than are needed right now just to be sure of having sufficient capacity when (or if!) growth occurs. This hardware will take months to manufacture, install and commission. It will require expensive maintenance to keep it running, and power-hungry air-conditioned rooms to house it. It will probably have little redundancy built-in, so when major overhauls are made, or should a fire or natural disaster occur; the entire operation is at risk. And, by the very nature of technology, everything will be obsolete in a few years anyway as new standards evolve and new technologies emerge. Imagine working with the same computer and software that you used four years ago – it’s possible, but hardly desirable.
But that is not the end of the hidden costs – indeed, it may not even be the largest cost in the long term. The in-house deployment and integration of all of this technology requires a commensurately large team of IT and telecoms professionals to support it. The fact that a lot of these components come from a wide variety of different vendors has several implications. Firstly, since these components are not always designed to work together – computing and telephony having two different sets of standards and protocols – a lack of true integration often shows through. This can be seen in the fact that, when someone calls a Contact Centre, even when they have identified themselves to the system, they have to repeat the same information to the agent.
Secondly, it often requires a small army of highly-paid consultants to make them work together – and, typically, several months downrange by the time the centre is operational, so much nervous energy has been normally expended that nobody wants to tweak anything in case something fails. If a change were requested, it could take reams of paperwork and a couple of days to implement even a minor modification, such as re-routing a call from an agent based in the centre to one working from home. Inflexibility is possibly the greatest cost of all: losing the capability of the organisation to respond quickly to a change in the business environment just cannot be tolerated these days. Given that NewVoiceMedia clients tweak their system on average four times a day to respond to events in their market gives an indication of the gulf that exists.
Hosted Contact Centres
A hosted telephony service uses a third party, such as NewVoiceMedia, to provide the links between the caller and the agent. Typically, the caller calls a central number if using a phone, or dials in a URL if using a VoIP phone. At the other end of this call, the hosted platform switches the call directly to the appropriate agent. Note that there is no requirement for agents to be physically in the same building – or even in the same country. Of course, there is lot more going on in the background, and this is where the different suppliers of hosted solutions differ widely!
Technically speaking, providing a hosted PSTN/mobile service is a much heavier challenge than VoIP alone. We believe that the NewVoiceMedia ‘Application Hub’ is one of our major strengths. Our platform is based on Stratus fault-tolerant server architecture that delivers greater than 99.999% uptime; it uses Aculab signal processors (3 DSP chips per caller channel to remove echoes, reduce background noise and for CTI control any time during the call); and we developed our own softswitches for carrier-grade signalling. Our infrastructure is based inside our telco partners’ premises and is supported day and night, 365 days a year. These hubs are, in turn, connected to major propriety networks across Europe and to hubs around the world. We believe we are the only hosted company to be so tightly integrated into Tier 1 networks. The platform hardware aside, NewVoiceMedia owns all the Intellectual Property of its solution and has many patents pending for its implementation. It also means that we can rapidly adapt the platform to meet new applications and challenges.
Multi-tenant hosting
A hosting platform can be made exclusive to one client (managed service) or partitioned to provide a service for multiple clients (‘multi-tenant’). The NewVoiceMedia solution was built from the start as being multi-tenant. The latter shares the costs of the platform and makes the end-user solution less expensive. Note that there are very few multi-tenant solution vendors, especially at the network level.
Hosting is a specialised business
Providing a fully convergent, multi-tenant hosting telephony platform is a very specialised business. NewVoiceMedia has over 100 man years experience of operating such systems - more than any other vendor: we know what it takes to run a hosted service with 99.999% uptime 365 days a year 24/7, we have the telecoms engineers who understand and communicate at peer level with our telco partners, we have the computer scientists who are working at the leading edge of VoiceXML standards for computer telephony integration. And we have a deep understanding of what it takes to implement a solution for a contact centre.