Jumping Into the Clouds

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

At the Gartner Symposium last week, Cloud Computing was listed as the number one strategic technology area for 2010 (up from number three in 2009). Among other things, Gartner said that companies should figure out which specific cloud services might give them the most value. Voice portal in the cloud is one such service and, in my opinion, it’s here to stay.

You may be wondering why I am so confident about voice portal capabilities in the cloud. It’s largely because I see so many benefits. To start with, voice portal in the cloud gives businesses a choice between an OpEx model versus a CapEx model, allowing them to avoid spending their limited budgets on equipment such as additional servers and telephone lines. Leveraging voice portal capabilities in the cloud is also a great way for companies to get up-and-running quickly because it doesn’t require on-premise hardware installation, provisioning or integration.

I think it’s important to note that not all cloud voice portals are equal – there are hosted solutions and on-demand offerings, but also hybrid solutions that use a combination of hosted and premised-based options designed to help companies ease into cloud computing. Hosted and on-demand offerings are basically the same in overall concept (they are both “in the cloud”) but vastly different in terms of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, performance and reliability. With a hosted solution, your capacity is limited. So, handling unexpected or temporary spikes in traffic will be a challenge. Plus, it’s a real headache to determine appropriate capacity. In addition, a hosted solution requires that you pay for technology upgrades and that ultimately performance and reliability is limited.

An on-demand solution, on the other hand, allows you to adjust your capacity in real-time, as the needs of your customers and your business change. You don’t pay for the capacity that is dedicated to you; you simply pay per minute for what you use. In addition, you get the benefits of scale, evergreen technologies and business continuity, as well as carrier-grade reliability. As a result, you can create and deploy more effective self-service applications that drive more savings and return on investment to your organization.

If you’re a bit uneasy about making the jump from on-premise computing to cloud computing, a hybrid option might be your best approach. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, which is expected to be commercially available next month, is one such example. In this type of solution, the voice portal application resides on premise, but the storage is in the cloud. It’s a great option for companies that want to try out cloud computing or just save money on storage/server costs.

Next week, I’ll provide you with examples of how some of our customers are using on-demand solutions and share with you some of their results.

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Culture and Technology Go Hand in Hand

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

Unified communications is as much about a company’s culture as it is about technology. You see, for years people have been sending emails on computers and using separate devices to initiate and receive phone calls and retrieve voicemail messages. They’ve been going through the motions of making phone calls and leaving voicemail messages but, until now, they haven’t actually had the ability to see someone’s presence and proactively pick the best communication channel.

Because of UC, Aspect employees no longer have clunky old phones sitting on their desks. For some, the idea of losing their traditional phone was somewhat of a radical concept that was difficult to swallow – no more traditional phone? Nope. Instead, our employees now plug their headsets into their computers and “click” on a phone number or just type a person’s name, rather than dial, to initiate a phone call. This change was more than just a physical change, getting rid of telephony hardware. It required a philosophical shift. With UC, it becomes less about making the phone call, sending the email, or leaving the voicemail message. With UC, it is entirely about communicating.

To get our organization ready for this monumental shift in thinking, our IT group shared detailed information with our employees at every step along the way. We also provided each employee with a brief but thorough training session to help them get used to the new features and capabilities available through OCS.  And, we were available to answer any questions that popped up after employees had transitioned.

I’d be remiss if I led you to believe that end users were the only ones to face a cultural shift. Every IT organization will also experience changes with a UC implementation. Here’s why. In completely separate data and voice environments, IT usually owns the data network and facilities or the contact center owns the voice network. Voice and data have fit neatly into these little boxes for quite some time. But, UC blurs the boundaries by converging voice and data, and making it possible to look at voice, voicemail, conferencing, email, IM, and the network as one service. This inevitably brings up organizational challenges that companies need to address as they navigate through the UC planning process. Some important questions are: What does each department own today and how will that change with the UC deployment? Who will manage the new, converged network? Who will they report to?

I’m more than happy to talk to you in detail about the paradigm that organizations must overcome when they deploy OCS. What questions do you have?

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Choose Your Functionality Wisely

Author: Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

When it comes to Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), one of the most challenging aspects is determining what functionality and capabilities to deploy and where to deploy them.  Why is this so tough? Because whatever you decide will greatly change the way every single person across your entire organization conducts business and communicates, every single minute of every single day. And, while I can promise you the change will be for the better, the thought of that is just plain scary.

So, how do you know what to do? In Aspect’s case, we knew that we wanted to use OCS for enterprise voice, but we didn’t know much about the needs of our key business and IT stakeholders.  So, at the front end of the project, we pulled together a cross-functional group of our key stakeholders to learn about what tools they were currently using, and what difficulties they were facing with those tools.  We also spent quite a bit of time talking about their business strategies, metrics and measures.

After meeting with our key stakeholders, we had a pretty good idea about what they needed from us in order to do their jobs more efficiently. We had gleaned enough information to develop our communication and collaboration priorities, identify cost saving opportunities, and outline our desired pace of change. In case you’re wondering, we opted to take advantage of nearly all of the capabilities Office Communications Server 2007 R2 had to offer, ranging from conferencing capabilities to Instant Messaging and Presence.  In addition, we decided to deploy a full UC strategy versus just OCS voice as we had first considered.

We would soon come to realize that determining our core functionality was only the tip of the iceberg.  We also needed to figure out what type of capabilities we wanted people working in their offices to have, versus people working from home. Nearly one quarter of Aspect’s employees work from home or in remote offices and hundreds more travel on a regular basis, so this was another big consideration. Our IT group ultimately decided that it was important to provide a common interface for all communications to every single person in our company so that each employee, regardless of their position in the company or geographic location, would have the exact same communication functionality. We wanted usability to be ubiquitous everywhere. I’m happy to say that we’ve achieved that objective.

What OCS functionality is of most interest to your organization?

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