Beat the Competition and Keep the CFO Happy: The Argument for Communications as a Service Solutions

When the economy is weak, the first thought is how to trim expenses and continue to provide the best customer experience possible. Many times capital investments are the first to go by the wayside. The question is whether this is penny wise and pound foolish. Will the impact on customers be more expensive than the cost of the investment? There is no easy answer. But, with communications as a service (CaaS) solutions, now there are better alternatives from which to choose. Hosted solutions or “software as a service” models have been around for many years. And, while reliability has been important for these types of applications, the extra burden of the “always on” expectation for communication applications has constrained adoption of these models. CaaS solutions need to be as reliable as dial tone in order to gain significant adoption in the marketplace. Today there are deployment options that make this reliability a reality.

In a conversation I had recently with Roe Jones, Interactive Intelligence Product Manager, he noted that “communications-as-a-service is enjoying renewed interest due, in part, to companies looking at alternatives to CapEx spending as a result of today’s challenging economic environment. Vendors such as Interactive Intelligence are making CaaS even more appealing by offering flexible deployment models that afford better control and security of customer data. In addition, should future needs change, customers can easily migrate to a premise-based solution without re-writing their applications. Together, this makes CaaS an increasingly compelling solution for many types of businesses.” 

So, how do you decide if CaaS is right for your business? You’ve determined that you need access to some, more or better applications to achieve your business plans. Your executives are aligned with the proposal. But, the CFO says there are no funds available to acquire and implement the necessary solution and challenges you to find a solution within the monthly expense budgets. Several vendors provide CaaS type solutions (Interactive Intelligence, Five 9’s, Angel.com, the large telcos, just to name a few). Which one is right for you will depend on your specific business needs (features, security, reliability, costs, global reach).

To give you an example, let’s look at three flavors of CaaS as provided by Interactive Intelligence. From this discussion, you can begin to create the checklist from which to evaluate your options and requirements.

High Reliability + Data Control (Local Control VoIP Model) – At this time, this CaaS deployment option appears to be unique to Interactive Intelligence. This alternative combines the benefits of the Interactive Intelligence secure data center (SAS 70 Type II compliant) with your requirement to manage and secure company and customer data on your site. You can maintain your existing telco circuits to terminate calls, receive application routing and information from Interactive Intelligence via MPLS, and leverage on-premise hardware (VoIP gateways, proxy servers, data stores).

Thumbs up from the CFO and Compliance Officer. 

• Feature-rich set of applications available when you need them based on a pay as you go model without the expense and complexity of installing and maintaining equipment and application
• Security and ownership of business and customer data on your site
• Efficient use of light weight SIP messaging architecture to deliver application intelligence while maintaining high bandwidth communications locally
• Reliability and survivability of customer interactions
• Rich user interface (UI) to support contact center agents, business users and managers
• Flexibility to respond to changing business conditions through the ability to configure applications

Outsource Solution (Remote Control VoIP Model) – You’re ready to support your customer interactions with a contact center, but you don’t have the in-house IT or Telecom expertise. In this case, the application is hosted completely at Interactive Intelligence’s secure data center connected over an MPLS network to your employees or contact center agents. Calls terminate on telco lines at Interactive Intelligence’s data center and are routed to IP phones or soft phones at your facilities.  

Why is the CFO smiling? Little to no capital investment. Predictable monthly expenses. Payment only for the application capabilities and capacity needed. Easy to use management interface minimizes cost of business application maintenance. Flexibility to meet changing business needs – scope and size. 

Existing PBX + New Application Solution (Remote Control TDM Model) – You have an existing PBX and phones but lack the application capabilities needed. Or, as a business owner you must address market changes quickly. The process and approvals needed to deploy projects through IT cannot support this rapid response. In this scenario, the application is hosted at the Interactive Intelligence data center, and calls still terminate on facilities there. However, once a routing decision is made, calls are routed to your employees over the PSTN and terminate on your existing PBX.

Is the CFO nodding in appreciation? Leveraging and extending the practical life of existing communication infrastructure plus the benefits outlined above. Application deployment within days and financed through the operating budget.

At the beginning of the decision process of whether CaaS is right for your company, it is important to consider the future possibility of moving the applications in-house. With Interactive Intelligence this is an option with defined migration plans and known costs regardless of which deployment option is used. Unlike many providers, the customer applications hosted by Interactive Intelligence are owned by the customer. With this in mind, evaluate your future desire to bring the application back in-house with the cost of having this flexibility. 

Interactive Intelligence maintains two hardened data centers located in the U.S. and the U.K. and CaaS solutions are currently available only in North America and EMEA. In discussions with Interactive Intelligence they are evaluating plans to expand service into Asia Pacific, Central and Latin America in the future. If you need to support users in these regions, you will need to ensure service availability.

Interactive’s data centers in combination with local deployment options can provide the reliability, security and scalability demanded by global enterprise applications. It’s important for you to understand if there are any single points of failure that could impact your ability to reach your customers, what measures are taken to ensure you don’t “hang up” on your customers, and what recovery looks like in case of an application failure. Even if you don’t lose calls, do you lose data? As with all solutions, ensure that the SLAs guaranteed by your chosen solution provider are sufficient for all your business requirements (application performance, data integrity, recovery time, etc.)

But, we started this discussion with the question of whether customers are ready to trust CaaS for their critical customer care solutions. Certainly hosted solutions like CaaS are not right for everyone, and companies will have to determine the approach that makes the most sense based on their goals (CapEx vs OpEx costs), their internal resources that can be dedicated to managing communication solutions, and the level of control they want over their communication systems and platforms. Clearly, hosted services are seeing tremendous growth and this is expected to continue. According to Roe Jones, “Our CaaS solutions have grown approximately 56% year over year from 2008 to 2009.” This is a good indicator of market acceptance. Expect to see similar claims by the large telcos and the smaller start-ups. Naturally, vendors will tout superior solutions. You have to decide if those solutions are relevant to your business objectives. 

This paper is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.