Contact Center: Unplugged

What The Heck Does It Mean To Be IT-Ready? And, Why Should You Care?

Author:  Gary Barnett

During the past few months, we’ve spoken at great length about the business problems that can be solved when the contact center is extended to the enterprise via unified communications (UC). I’m sure that the idea of being able to do this is exciting to you and your contact center colleagues, but when your IT department hears you talking about the possibilities, they’re possibly cringing.  You see, there is a good chance that they’re concerned that you’re planning to take your big black box and mess up their scalable, redundant, and reliable architecture.

The nice thing is you have the ability to calm their fears by letting them know you’re sensitive to their need for IT-ready solutions. You can tell them you want to deploy solutions that are designed and built specifically to meet their challenges – lowering costs, reducing complexity, providing stronger security and greater reliability, and enabling better responsiveness.

So, what the heck does it mean to be IT-ready? At its highest level, IT-ready is a concept.  It represents the notion that “IT-ready” contact center solutions are designed to fold into the enterprise architectures that are being deployed by IT organizations within companies. This in turn gives IT the ability to better address time and budget constraints, and the opportunity to do more with less.

There are five main criteria that must be incorporated into a solution for it to be deemed IT-ready.  The solution must:

1. Utilize services-based software and hosted solutions to more easily employ virtualization tools and techniques to simplify and reduce your physical footprint. An IT-ready unified solution reduces time- and cost-consuming integrations.  And, hosted solutions allow companies to save on network traffic costs and eliminates expensive networking equipment to diminish your cost of ownership. 
2. Provide standards-based capabilities, giving you the power to deploy your contact center applications on top of your transport of choice – Voice over IP or traditional voice (or even a blend of both). IT-ready solutions use session initiation protocol (SIP) to deliver optimal device and service provider choice, support XML-based open Web services and APIs, and integrate to data stores through ODBC, JDBC and XML.
3. Leverage standard system management, security practices and tools such as LDAP, Active Directory and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and SNMP.
4. Offer high availability and reliability and provide a variety of redundancy features – including disaster recovery options – that increase the fault tolerance and efficiency of the system and minimize single points of failure.
5. Support single- or multi-tenant deployments to provide greater choice and control to organizations.

IT-ready solutions are important for a variety of reasons.  Not only can they significantly reduce the burden on your IT staff, they can also give your contact center and your enterprise the tools it needs to reap all of the benefits of UC and, of course, they can help you make your customer happier and improve your bottom line.

Do you think IT-ready solutions will benefit your organization?

Author: Gary Barnett
Catergories: Contact Center Technology, Disaster Recovery, Open Source, Performance Optimization, Standards, Unified Communications

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