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Is Cloud computing forcing consolidation within Unified Communication technology providers?

Shift in technology forces change. Cloud computing is the result of high speed internet, superior hardware and software, and fast paced evolution of computer technology. This allows shared computing resources interconnected through the power of internet. UC offerings bring IP telephony and ‘Presence’, combined with other real-time communication services. Let us examine its commercial impact on the unified communications (UC) industry.

The market was once dominated by large players like Lucent and Nortel with many smaller niche players. The products geared towards enterprises were purchased outright and support was handled as a service. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) allowed space for the growth of the back office. The back office operations were boosted with the evolution of the call center ACD which runs as a layer on top of an underlying telephony infrastructure. The computer telephony integration (CTI), Personal Computers (PC) and the availability of computer telephony boards were the driving forces in the evolution of the call center software, that went far beyond the capabilities offered by an ACD. The internet revolution and the growth of VoIP presented opportunities for new players like Cisco. The astounding growth of Asterisk, the open source hybrid switch, revolutionized the industry and turned it upside down. Even though the need for both UC and contact center technology exploded during the last decade, the presence of Asterisk has exerted considerable downward pressure on the market leaders who offer UC and contact center technology.

Did all these changes impact the technology leaders of the day like Nortel, Lucent and Alcatel. We know that Nortel does exist and the modern day Alcatel is the combine entity of Lucent and Alcatel. Avaya is a leading UC provider that inherited some of Nortel’s technology. It is now owned by large equity groups who are known to look for opportunity to leverage growth and exit with investment gains. This has not transpired even though the media makes periodic pronouncements about Avaya, due to tepid growth and huge debt load. Shore-tel, another leading UC provider that offers enterprise IP telephony solutions, came out with an IPO in 2007. Its stock prices have been languishing much below the IPO offering. Recently, Mitel Networks has launched a hostile take-over bid at a value well below the initial IPO offering in 2007. The re-alignment and consolidation within UC technology providers may be a reflection of the downward pricing pressure caused by the growth and availability of UC and call center technology for open source platforms like Asterisk.

What is the role of open source technology like Asterisk in the growth of cloud based solutions? How much influence does cloud computing have on the on-going consolidation and re-alignment? Cloud solutions have introduced a newer paradigm where enterprises don’t make the upfront capital investment and retain the ability to switch providers. Imagine the size of today’s economy versus the year 2000. With globalization, the market  has exploded and in spite of this, large players have disappeared. The impact of the continued growth of cloud computing driven by powerful open source driven solutions will continue to put immense pressure on larger established UC technology providers. It will feel like the race to the bottom for many of them.

Cloud contact center solutions based on Asterisk offer all the UC features within their call center software at considerably less cost. When offered as a service, the cloud services take away the risk of large capital expense from an enterprise, while offering flexibility. It remains to be seen how legacy players in the UC realm react to the downward financial pressures brought on by Cloud contact center solutions, especially the ones driven by Asterisk with other open source technology stack.

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High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers

Cloud based call center software cater to very large systems. Asterisk is by far the most widely used telephony platform. As a natural evolution, the use of Asterisk in both Cloud and large premise based installations have come a long way. Technology for call center software is to some extent driven by the ‘assemble and build’ mode where various accessory technology element available in software form come together to deliver the final solution. Call center software depends on the underlying PBX technology and other technologies for web, database, SIP, and redundancy. Continue reading “High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers”

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Auto Provisioning VoIP Phones for Contact Center ACD

Unlike a standard telephone, voice over IP (VoIP) phones require special configurations to connect to the telephony server across your network. These settings can either be entered manually, or through a process called auto provisioning. Auto provisioning provides a central location for all the phone to access the configuration files necessary for them to register to your local telephony server, whether the server is on premise or in the cloud. This adds to ease of administration and reduces the overall cost of maintaining mission critical infrastructure for an Asterisk based call center.

Continue reading “Auto Provisioning VoIP Phones for Contact Center ACD”

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Integrating External Applications with Call Center Systems

When a Call Center System is mentioned what comes to mind often is a call floor with many agents dedicated to taking or making calls for a given campaign.  But now more often the case is an office which needed a queue with enhanced features while integrating with their current work flow and applications.  For one example lets take a quick look at how we use the Q-Suite with Redmine in-house with our support department in our unified communications configuration.  The support department’s role is to handle requests from clients coming in from various sources, we get these requests in three main ways:

  • Incoming calls.  Incoming calls have their caller id looked up and are then linked with given project in redmine.  This allows the Q-Suite screens to pre fill out a search and show most recent issues for that given client.  Having this information available helps our support personnel quickly respond to any questions on outstanding tickets by knowing what outstanding items are still open and their current status.
  • Redmine tickets.  Requests with clients entering a ticket directly with redmine or providing feedback on an existing ticket.  The people on support belong to the redmine queue for the clients they are involved with.  Any open tickets are queued and given out to a support person when they are ready for the next while a caller is not queued.  This works well as there are many times during the day when there are no incoming calls and the system delivers the next redmine ticket to be worked on.  This ensures any outstanding redmine tickets are dealt with and not forgotten, something which can be mistakenly done without a system in place.
  • Email. We also have support email which clients use to initiate a request.  This functions very similar except a lookup is done based on the email address and matched with a client.  This allows the person handling the communication to have the same features when a phone call is coming in where they can match it to any open redmine tickets or create a new one as required.

More information on the Q-Suite is at www.Q-Suite.com and Redmine can be found at www.redmine.org

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Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers

Asterisk clusters

Load balancing in Asterisk can be an overloaded term. In some cases, it refers to spreading calls to multiple servers. In others, it refers to calls made outbound. There are other cases as well. The two cases mentioned are two that are not handled by Asterisk out of the box, and additional software may need to be introduced in order to handle them. In multi-server Asterisk call center installs, load balancing allows calls to be distributed more evenly which prevents overloading any particular server. Continue reading “Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers”

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Maximizing Call Center Software Performance With Load Balancing

When adding capacity to an Asterisk-based ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system, the desire is to increase the throughput of the system in a linear fashion.  Choosing call center software that allows the addition of servers to increase capacity is an essential step.  However, one must take certain steps to ensure that individual servers don’t become a choke point for performance.  This is where load balancing comes in. Continue reading “Maximizing Call Center Software Performance With Load Balancing”

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Three Common IVR / Auto-attendant problems

In setting up an ACD System you need an IVR or auto-attendant to get your callers into the queues to be distributed to your agents.  However there are a few common pitfalls you can mistakenly get into when doing so.

  • Endless loops. A lot of solutions have a built in option to protect a single menu.  This is usually done with a max repeat and then a default option.  This works for that specific menu but you still need to be concerned an overall loop is not put in place.  For example if two menus default options point at each other they can just loop forever without input. I’ve seen a few cases where someone’s phone isn’t properly hung up or the discon from the telco is lost keeping the channel open.  The issue is that with a loop a channel of the trunk is busy until that call is cleared.  The best way to avoid this is an overall counter to protected against overall loops.  This has to be balanced so a normal caller is not affected but users who mistakenly or purposely use up resources can be cleaned in timely manner.  Solve this by visually looking at the IVR and all options and put a counter to stop this. It will save on resources by freeing trunks not being used by real clients.
  • No pause in logic. I’ve seen a loop configured where it checks if agents are logged in and ready to take a call to a given queue and if not then check another and looping until one if found.  This is very much related to the first item if the loop is the dialplan is checking time of day or agents in a queue and not pausing.  A pause can be as simple as an audio playback.  Without that or a wait, for input or just a delay, the channel will loop and do the checks in the dialplan as fast as the server will allow eating up CPU time and raising the load.  If a few callers get into this type of looping it can affect performance of the system which may adversely affect real clients.  This example is flawed in other ways as properly configured queues, priority, skills, and time of day rules should avoid the need for this type of check in most cases — but I did see this one configured and almost put into production.
  • Inconsistent sounding recordings. This is not going to cause any performance issues but can affect client’s perception and confidence in your business.  If the prompts are inconsistent in volume or cut/merged from many small files it will not always sound natural and can be distracting.  Solve this by using a professional, for asterisk systems you can hire Allison Smith to record extra prompts or company names needed.  If recording your own prompts ensure they are all recorded in a similar manner and normalize the volume if needed.

 All of these can be easily avoided with the Q-Suite platform with it’s advanced dialplan builder and audio file management interfaces.  Also highly recommended is testing your IVR configuration from time to time to ensure it still fits your needs and functions as expected.

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Trust, But Verify: Simple Steps to Finding Your IVR Issues

The call came first thing in the morning.  Agents were logged in, callers could dial in, but callers were not getting connected to agents.  A foundational tenet of skills-based call routing is that calls get routed to agents, so the team leapt into action.  As support techs logged in and began gathering PCAPs (Packet Captures) and poring over logs to discover the cause, we also began test calls into their IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Continue reading “Trust, But Verify: Simple Steps to Finding Your IVR Issues”

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Call Survival and Contact Center ACD

The rapid pace of innovation in Voice over IP (VoIP) technology and telephony software has been a blessing to contact centers around the world and has spurred a surge in deployment. The advantages of fully featured applications and low costs have been offset by the possibilities of service interruptions. The US patented Q-Suite Call Survival feature allows deployment of Asterisk based contact center ACD in a mission-critical and high value environment. Continue reading “Call Survival and Contact Center ACD”