Contact centers are situated everywhere around the Globe and words like BPO and back-office a permanent part of our vocabulary. In 2000, I remember us taking more than a month to install and cut-over a call center solution for a 60 seat contact center. We were unique in one sense, we had switched over to Linux and could do lot things remote. Today it is a completely different world and we almost all of our contact center installations, remote, whether it be Nigeria, Botswana or Europe. We can install a full feature call center software and solution in 2 days once the hardware and infrastructure ready and the network access and bandwidth are made available. The operating system install with flavors like Ubuntu make it so easy that we don’t think about the complexities too much. The telecommunication infrastructure has become extremely versatile and complicated at the same time. You may have agents sitting in Philippines, infrastructure in U.S.A. or Europe and handling calls for various geographic domains.
The risk of issues cropping during a contact center installation has increased manifold. There are too many moving parts. The server hardware, the Linux OS versions, Asterisk, Our call center software Q-Suite and VoIP. It is not easy and the demands are a lot higher. Components like Apache, MySQL and modules of different programs and framework add to the complexity. It is not possible to sit on a stable version of your software as the underlying structure is changing. Every major commercial software vendor applies patches periodically. Once upon a time, there was the concept of carrier grade equipment and it applied to the software with the equipment. The availability and capability of Asterisk has made it easy for small operators to get into the business of reselling terminations without investing on the kind of redundancy and fail-over protections.
It is all for the good in the long run and points to the need for good project management while deploying call center solutions.