James P. Dunn, CEO
Three Opportunities to Hear James P. Dunn, CEO, TelStar Hosted Services, Inc., at ITEXPO East 2012, February 1-3, 2012 in Miami, Florida!
We welcome you to join the discussion! Should you have questions, or wish to set up a meeting with James or the TelStar Hosted team at ITEXPO, please do not hesitate to contact Meghan Harris, mharris(at)telstarhosted(dot)com.
Panel Wednesday – 02/01/12
10:00-10:45am
Cloud Communications Summit, Co-located with ITEXPO Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami
Cutting Through the Fluff: The Business Case for Cloud
Recent initiatives from vendors and service providers to deliver various communications services via the latest trend – the cloud – to market, are designed to help businesses become more agile and more competitive, while helping increase operational efficiency. But for all the features and benefits that all seem to benefit businesses in their efforts to operate more effectively, businesses considering cloud based communications services are still faced with the same challenges they always have, and must present a solid business case.
This session will discuss the benefits of cloud communications and how its features and the capabilities it delivers in terms of hard savings as well as soft benefits, and how both can be translated into an achievable ROI, so that businesses are able to provide the necessary justifications for migrating from tried and tested technologies to this new phenomenon.
Speech Wednesday, February 1, 2012
1.30 pm – 2.15 pm
Asterisk World, Co-located with ITEXPO Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami
The Crowd Moves to the Cloud!
James Dunn, CEO-TelStar Hosted Services, Inc.
In this recessionary environment, CIOs face business challenges that pull them in different directions – they need to reduce dependence on outdated equipment, ensure reliability, and deliver updated technology to increase revenue , all while reducing costs. The Cloud offers an opportunity for CIOs to reduce capital expenditure and source the latest in technology and infrastructure with less investment risk.
Are CIOs Really Adopting the Cloud?
Both business executives and IT executives are interested in moving to the Cloud. According to an end of 2010 survey of 1,050 global respondents by HfSResearch, Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It: The Secrets in the Source, both IT and business executives see the cloud as “an enabling business service or IT delivery model that drives innovation in organizations.” This study says that 55% of IT and 65% of business executives recognize that the cloud drives down the overall cost of running business applications. According to the survey, there is significant interest in increasing spending on cloud services: over 20% of business executives and over 10% of IT Executives interviewed expected to spend over 20% of their departmental IT budgets on cloud services in the next 18 months, and over 20% of business executives and about 20% of IT executives expected to spend 10% to 20% of their departmental IT budgets on cloud services.
The market for CaaS and Hosted Contact Centers specifically has strong momentum and is expected to continue to grow. In the North American Hosted Contact Center Markets study , Frost & Sullivan projects that hosted contact centers will have a CAGR of 32% from 20072015. A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by HP forecasts a CAGR of 31% by 2014. In the Forrester Consulting study, 58% of the 900 SMBs interviewed expressed interest in purchasing an IP Contact Center as a Service.
Does the Cloud Really Make my Contact Center Cheaper, Faster, and Better?
Frost & Sullivan’s Premise vs. Hosted Contact Center: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis shows that outsourcing contact centers to a hosted provider reduces the total cost of contact center ownership over premise systems in 35 years. The study showed that, the larger the contact center is, the higher the savings. Also, the more functions hosted in the cloud, the higher the savings. Savings were up to 43% for 500 seats completely hosted in the cloud, according to this study.
Lowering total cost is not the only convenience of cloudbased call center services. Hosted contact centers can support a widely distributed workforce, including athome agents or remote locations. The cloud facilitates rapid deployment and scalability as business needs change. A hosted call center service can help address seasonality or act as a backup system or disaster recovery for premisebased services.
What Concerns Do CIOs Have About the Cloud?
CIOs’ main concerns about using the cloud for infrastructure or other core services are reliability, security in a sharedservice model, and loss of control. Outsourcing any business process to the Cloud will still require some expert management inhouse, and a backup plan, but the cloud can also offer multisourcing and redundancy. Managers should check the security and reliability of any cloud service before adopting it, and consider SLAs with cloud service providers to ensure that their needs are met.
In Conclusion
The Cloud allows CIOs to source the latest technology without major capital investment and less investment risk. Studies indicate that Communications-as-a-Service and Hosted Contact Center Services are growing rapidly. Cloud based contact center services can save money on the total cost of operations, and are progressively more available, flexible, scalable, stable and reliable. As cloud based services mature, adopting these will continue to become easier and less expensive, and CIOs will become increasingly comfortable with managing them.
Panel Thursday, February 2, 2012
2:00-2:45pm ET
ITEXPO Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami
Conference track: Customer Engagement
Panel title: “Keeping Up with the Contact Center” (CE-09)
As consumers have changed, so has the contact center. Throughout the last 20 years, we have seen a shift not only in technology, but in the mentality of the contact center and those who manage it.
We have evolved from the mindset that contact centers need thousands of agents in order to make sure that every call is being handled to the idea of a single point of contact where one agent is empowered to handle multiple types of queries more efficiently. This is challenging, though, in the fact that many organizations made an intentional effort to employ a large pool of agents that could take any call. But could they handle every call? Consumers today demand a single point of contact that can text, email, chat, join in Web collaboration or even proactively reach out to them before they have to – delivering the right information, being the most important step. These are two drastically different worlds.
This session will consider the evolution of the contact center footprint over time, from hub-and-spoke models to centralized models, and now virtualized multichannel contact centers. Attendees will learn best practices and key ideas for transforming contact centers from traditional operations to optimized resources that drive positive customer engagement.
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