IP contact center technology: what you need to know (Part II); Multisite contact center technology centralization: eliminating the risks.

Last month, we focused on how multisite organizations can leverage IP contact center technology to maximize productivity through more efficient routing while dramatically reducing technology operating costs and increasing the overall quality of their customer service delivery. We also focused on a few core technological pitfalls that can be easily avoided early on--but which inevitably lead to disaster if they aren't addressed up front.

This month, we'll be focusing more on how software architectures can determinatively impact the political viability of any technology centralization initiative; in other words, how technology can overcome rather than reinforce the traditional objections to technology centralization.

Technology Must Address Political Realities

In general, local managers can't be counted on to support a technology centralization initiative that would place their site's operational efficiency (upon which their careers and compensation are typically dependent) in the hands of a remote IT department that is not accountable within their own local reporting structure.

One option, of course, is to try to bulldoze over those objections and gain approval for implementing shared infrastructure anyway. Of course, even if you did succeed in getting the job done over local objections, the operational challenge would remain--since local productivity could ultimately be compromised by the whims and competing obligations of a centralized IT staff. Of course, at that point, the affected managers would already know who to blame.

So What's The Real Answer?

The answer lies in technology that is designed-for-purpose to address the need for segmented, decentralized control over shared technology resources. In other words, the answer to winning over the opposition lies in technology that provides local managers with even greater control over their proposed "virtual" infrastructure than they had before with traditional premise-based systems.

"Multitenant" Technology

The term that our industry has most consistently applied to solutions that empower companies to share centralized infrastructure while maintaining local autonomy is "multitenant" technology. Interestingly, this same term also applies to technology centralization solutions that don't provide any mechanism for local autonomy. Given the lack of clarity in current terminology, caveat emptor ("buyer beware") obviously applies.

Historical Context

Today, service providers such as MCI, TELUS, Siebel ("Contact On Demand") and others offer hosted "multitenant" contact center services as commercial alternatives to traditional premise-based systems--with "tenant autonomy" that is clearly superior to what can be achieved with traditional premise-based systems. Since companies planning to migrate to centralized infrastructures will inevitably have to address the same show-stopping issues that plagued early service provider deployments, an understanding of their early challenges is important.

Lessons Learned From Commercial Service Providers

"Multitenancy" within shared infrastructure is a concept that grew out of the ambitions of large telephone companies and other service providers to extend their brands into "hosted" or "virtual" communications infrastructure services. Their mission was (and still is) to compete directly with traditional premise-based system vendors by eliminating the need for companies to deploy their own systems and IT staff at any corporate location.

Initially, some service providers tried hosting dedicated systems on behalf of subscriber clients; this "managed services" approach delivered little end-user value beyond a marginal labor arbitrage. Its inherent inefficiency also made early service provider offerings too expensive to capture any significant market share. It soon became clear that the missing ingredient was economies of scale--which needed to be passed on to the corporate consumer in the form of lower prices. It also became apparent that in the next-generation offering, all subscriber companies would have to be serviced from a common centralized platform.

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The first deployments of multitenant technology were rushed to market and relied on retro-fitted solutions based on older, premise-based technologies. As a result, they relied on a single set of software executables to govern all "tenants"; meaning that the business logic of all locations had to be intertwined in common customized software. At that time, "multitenancy" referred only to data segmentation--where only the proprietary data of each tenant was segmented and kept separate. This approach accomplished the objective of enabling tenant locations to share common licenses, hardware and phone lines--but it also required local autonomy to be entirely sacrificed.

The retro-fitted approach was also rife with other challenges. Since all tenant companies shared common back-end software processes, provisioning new campaigns or modifying old ones for any individual tenant carried with it the risk that new bugs would be introduced for all tenants. Carriers called this the "new bugs for old tenants" problem, and it effectively prevented service providers from scaling their businesses. Multitenancy couldn't deliver economies of scale if you were afraid of adding new tenants; and customer satisfaction suffered as service providers feared the technology stability consequences of being responsive to their legacy subscriber tenants.

For a while after this phase, the momentum toward hosted services stagnated. While "traditional" vendors largely shied away from making any significant investments in multitenant technology, it was left to a few rebel engineers to leave the security of their traditional vendor roots and start their own companies in order to develop an entirely new breed of hosted services technology.

Soon a new service provider technology paradigm emerged that addressed all of the prior limitations and empowered the delivery of hosted contact center services at scale. Part of this new paradigm involved the ability to run separate software processes for each tenant while sharing common hardware, licenses and phone lines. This enabled tenants to enjoy autonomous control over their own technology-driven business processes without jeopardizing the stability of the centralized infrastructure or sacrificing any economies of scale. Segmented software processes also offered the added benefit of enabling an unlimited number of tenant-specific custom integrations to take place with different third-party products without resulting in "code bloat."

This new paradigm also introduced the concept of "integration-by-design"; so the diverse contact center technologies that previously had to be cobbled together by integrators could now be easily provisioned and modified on demand from browser menus. These menus mirrored traditional needs analysis approaches in order to eliminate the need for sacrifice. Of course, Web services also had to be provided to empower both nonstandard deployments and local integrations with third-party client software.

That was five years ago. Service provider technology has matured greatly over the last five years--with carriers and service providers around the world now delivering or launching hosted contact center services at scale to their customers.

The benefit to subscriber companies arising from this unique menu-driven approach turned out to be enormous as well. It empowers tenant managers to provision their own multimedia campaigns on demand--and "fix" their own strained business processes in real time at even the most granular levels. As you might expect, companies that can address such issues quickly make more money. Not surprisingly, that intuitively obvious conclusion has also been supported by academic research.

In Short

Companies considering deploying centralized infrastructure would do well to closely examine the architectural underpinnings of their proposed solutions from the historical perspective of the commercial service provider experience. Hosted services technology, originally developed for commercial hosting, has really become the enabler for successful "corporate hosting" of IP contact center technology across geographically dispersed sites.

Eli Borodow is the CEO of Telephony@Work, the leading provider of adaptive, multitenant IP contact center technology for service providers and multimedia contact centers. Kevin Hayden is the Director of Integrated Contact Centre Solutions at TELUS Communications Inc., a tier-1 telecommunications carrier in Canada. TELUS offers Telephony@Work's CallCenterAnywhere solution to Canadian companies on a hosted basis and is the Canadian leader in hosted contact center services.

A Special Editorial Series Sponsored by Telephony@Work