Hook, Line and Contact Center
Aspect bets it all on Microsoft OCS – with a worldwide Microsoft “poster child” implementation and success story. I had the opportunity to discuss Aspect’s OCS strategy with Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect, who is currently relieved and cautiously celebrating the start of a highly successful implementation of Microsoft’s OCS solution.
First, some background. Aspect is not a new name in telecommunications. For years it’s been associated with high-end contact centers. But this is essentially a new Aspect, based on several acquisitions and name changes. Concerto Software acquired Aspect Communications and became Aspect Software in 2005. The name Aspect offered more cache than Concerto Software, even though Concerto was the acquirer (much like AT&T Wireless had more cache when Cingular acquired it). Concerto Software might best be described as an acquisitive company – over the past several years Concerto acquired companies and/or assets from Rockwell, Positive Software, Center Force Solutions, Melita, and of course, Aspect Communications. Along the way, Concerto acquired a whole lot of locations and technologies. The new company is not called simply Aspect.
Earlier this year, Aspect also acquired a new equity partner - Microsoft Corporation. As a leading contact center player, Aspect lists some of the world’s largest contact centers among its customers. Needless to say, contact center functionality (inherent and via partnerships) is critical to Microsoft’s OCS enterprise strategy. Many enterprises, when looking to purchase a new switch, also have contact centers and need to ensure that the vendor providing their switching solution can also support their contact center solution. Since Microsoft OCS currently does not have strong native call center capabilities, the potential of this partnership is clear. Early evidence of the power of this Microsoft/Aspect shared vision is evident with Global Crossing’s decision to standardize on these joint technologies in their call center operations.
Using its experience from its internal OCS rollout, Aspect, via its Professional Services division, now offers OCS design and implementation services.
Aspect carefully evaluated its technologies, infrastructures, partnerships, and technology directions and concluded that OCS was critical to its future. The company has been migrating is technologies, internal skills, and infrastructure around OCS. For internal systems, this meant a strategy to replace all 16 PBX systems, eliminate all phones, and consolidate all phone processing hardware and trunks into three global locations. The project isn’t very far along yet, but far enough for Aspect to be claiming victory and impressive ROI figures. This is right out of the Microsoft OCS strategy book.
Aspect selected to house all OCS hardware worldwide into three locations to serve 20 sites (US, UK, and Singapore); all office locations will have local phone numbers, but calls will go in/out of their nearest center. The 450 employees that work from home will have numbers from area code 978. In lieu of a phone, employees are issued a simple USB headset to enable them to use the Office Communicator client (PC or Web client). A small number of USB speakerphones are provided for conference room locations. The OCS server infrastructure includes a total of 23 dedicated redundant servers. The entire solution also requires complementary Microsoft servers for messaging (Exchange) and LDAP.
Exact figures were not provided, but the ROI looks something like this:
On the costs side, Aspect licensed 23 Microsoft OCS servers, plus enterprise licensing of Office Communicator clients (Aspect claims that Microsoft did not provide any software licenses as part of its equity agreement). In addition, significant network upgrades were necessary, including increased bandwidth, new SIP trunks, and QoS upgrades, plus hardware maintenance agreements, phones for public locations and conference rooms, and a few thousand headsets.
On the cost savings side, Aspect is realizing significant savings in external conferencing services ($75k/month). By turning off legacy PBX systems, Aspect intends to realize a savings of $300,000/year in maintenance costs (based on eliminating 16 PBX systems from multiple vendors), and expects to realize $300k-$400k per year in lower circuits and lower per minute long distance charges. Based on these figures, Aspect is forecasting a 100% return on investment in about one year.
That is pretty impressive, and isn’t even counting all of the benefits that UC provides. For example, Aspect isn’t factoring in any reduced travel, even though travel savings are often among the biggest contributors to the UC ROI model. The company also isn’t counting any productivity gains frequently associated with presence on the desktops (although this is pretty hard to measure). Lastly, the company is not claiming any CO2 savings, which are also associated with reduced computer rooms and reduced travel.
All in all, Aspect comes out looking pretty good on this deal. It’s a CIO’s dream come true - replace everything with a new comprehensive solution based on cutting-edge technology with financial and strategic benefits to the business. Plus, Aspect is now building upon its experience and helping other companies with their UC planning and implementation.
Aspect learned that rolling out OCS was not like simply installing just another phone system. It involved some key cultural shifts in the way employees work, including migrating to soft phones (although Jamie felt that this was not very disruptive). In addition, Jamie noted that the introduction of presence-based communications had an impact on the corporate culture that people needed to adjust to. It wasn’t too difficult for Aspect employees to adapt to the use of presence since it had a significant positive impact on internal communications.
The IT organization found that the implementation required a tighter collaboration of voice and data skills than in prior VoIP implementations. The project required extraordinary planning based on its complexity, which was further exacerbated by testing with pre-released software (via Microsoft’s Technical Adoption Program- TAP).
Being on the forefront has its benefits, but there are risks. This is very likely the largest, most complex Microsoft OCS system implemented to date. So far Jamie claims that they haven’t hit any surprise ceilings, but the risk remains. Plus OCS is a young product with some maturity limitations. Office Communicator reports availability and phone status, but can’t see the status of the cell phone. Many of the OCS options from traditional switch vendors do report cell phone status. Jamie intends to address mobility in a separate future phase of the project. The fact conference rooms are being equipped with USB speaker phones requires employees to bring a computer to the room to use the phone (Snom released a speaker phone that can now address this OCS need).
Aspect has a way to go on this project; many more sites to implement and integrate into centralized centers. It will be interesting to watch them expand their roll-out. The vast majority of their ROI is based on real hard dollar savings associated with external conferencing services, but for whatever reason, my conversation with Jamie was over that pesky external service despite completion of that location’s OCS rollout. Aspect should be very proud of both their accomplishments and plans regarding OCS – it is nice to see aggressive steps to UC with such a rapid return.
All in all, both Aspect and Microsoft are benefiting from this new relationship. Microsoft now has a contact center story to tell OCS customers, and Aspect has new state of the art UC solution, as well as a new professional services practice around OCS. Clearly a win-win and its only just begun.