Posts Tagged ‘Software as a Service’

Delivering SaaS 24X7

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

3CLogic offers call center solution with Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Like any other SaaS provider we have our regular maintenance window every Sunday morning from 12am EST to 4 AM EST. As you can imagine, running a call center is a critical mission and any downtime even if it is a scheduled one needs to be minimized. 3CLogic is well aware of its customer profile and the mission critical nature of the call center application that it offers. Since past two years, we have not done any extended maintenance on our servers. Recently we added a lot of new features and also redesigned the underlying database structure. This required an extended maintenance window than the usual four hours on Sunday morning. We sent out a notice to all our customers indicating that we would need a longer window to perform maintenance. The response we received completely surprised us. Several of our customers called back and said that longer maintenance window will have a serious impact on their business.

One of the clients who called us back was Oasis Marketing. Oasis Marketing does outbound calling. They wanted to run a 36 hour campaign over the weekend when we wanted to do maintenance. Another 3CLogic customer, Digital Bridge Communications based out of Ashburn, Virginia, was bracing for the blizzard of 2010 that weekend. They wanted their customer support folks to work from home while still providing the usual weekend coverage and support to their clients.

These were just few of the many examples, who could not have any kind of extended maintenance window even if it was pre-scheduled. 3CLogic quickly put a SWAT team in place, which started brainstorming ways to minimize or eliminate the downtime required for this extended maintenance window. Just as the blizzard moved into the DC metro area, we moved all the customers to backup servers. We took the production servers and started performing upgrades and maintenance on them. As soon as the maintenance was completed, we moved all the customers back to the upgraded servers. Result: Zero impact on our customers’ business. SaaS for mission critical application like call centers really means 99.999 up time.

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Software As A Service (SaaS) Business Models For Contact Centers

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

In contemporary era, almost all business are facing capital crunch and it is no surprise that   SaaS and Cloud Computing Services are in demand as they dramatically reduces upfront capital outlay. 
However, there is more than meets the eye. Software has been available for lease since past several decades and when offered on lease offers similar financial advantage as SaaS. When taken on lease, there could be little or no upfront capital outlay just like SaaS. In case of an operating lease for software, the monthly payment surfaces as an operating expense in income statement. The leased software stays off the balance sheet and does not show up as an asset. It would seem that the financial benefits of a SaaS model are not much different than getting an operating lease for software. This is true in theory.

In current scenario, company’s do not favour operating leases as compared to software-based technology as the leasing companies want a hard asset. Software may have tangible value, but it is often customized to meet the needs of a specific client, making it difficult to transfer it to a new owner. Software programs are also often governed by licensing agreements that either prohibit the transfer of a license to a new owner. A lot of software products would not be an option for operating leases since the software license can’t be in the lessor’s name.

With SaaS, enterprises can now truly rent software and pay only for what and when they use and still get all the financial advantages of leasing the software. In case of Contact Centers, 3CLogic has come up with innovative models to make SaaS truly attractive from a financial perspective.

1) Customers can rent Contact Center seats on a monthly basis. They pay a monthly subscription fee per seat for the use of Contact Center software. The model is similar to how salesforce.com charges for its SaaS. In case of Contact Center SaaS from 3CLogic, the customer pays an additional fee for call termination, outbound application or toll free service charges for inbound application. It’s customer’s responsibility to manage the number of seats they will be using from one month to next. They can increase or decrease the number of seats in any given month. This model provides tremendous amount of flexibility to the customer – they only pay for the seats that they use and when they use it.

2) It is well known that the attrition rate in Contact Centers is one of the highest in the business world. When a Call Center agent quits or is terminated, it is still necessary to retain all the statistics and analytics associated with his or her ID; at least for a few months. In some marketing companies, the telemarketers are frequently active for a few months and then become inactive for some time, only to return back after a few months. In such situations, the enterprise may find it difficult to keep track of active and inactive seats on a monthly basis; and which IDs to retain for tracking purposes and which IDs to be deactivated. 3CLogic offers a purely usage based model. The Enterprise only pays for the total number of hours the agents are logged into the hosted Call Center Service.

3) The third model that is tied to the usage works is as follows. The total number of call termination minutes are calculated for the entire Call Center in any given month and the enterprise is charged a fee based on the number of minutes consumed. This per minute charge consists of both software charge plus a charge for call termination for outbound application, or toll free service charges in case of an inbound application.

3CLogic offers these kinds of flexible business models because its platform is designed to be a multi-tenant platform from the ground up. The original design took into account that every tenant on its hosted service is going to have different technical and business requirements.

3CLogic’s distributed computing platform has been designed not only to address a variety of technical and business requirements, but the results are delivered to the customer in a matter of days, as opposed to months and years it takes with traditional Call Center platforms.

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Security And Data Lock-In Concerns with Software as a Service (SaaS)

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Whenever I read an article about SaaS or participate in a discussion that has anything to do with SaaS, concerns about security and data lock-in always surface at some point. When call center software is being delivered as SaaS and if the client application is in the financial industry, security requirements may even become show stoppers for the call center service to be delivered as a cloud service. The financial client may mandate that confidential customer information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers cannot be transmitted or stored outside of the customer premise. Traditionally such stringent security requirements dictated that the call center solution be deployed on customer’s premise. Only if there was a solution that would let the financial customer have the cake and eat it too i.e. opt for the call center solution as SaaS while ensuring that sensitive customer information never leaves its premise.

Marrying distributed computing architecture for a call center solution with SaaS, it is possible for customers to have their cake and eat it too. With a distributed computing architecture for call centers, sensitive and confidential information is stored on-premise close to where the call processing is happening on agent’s desktop. And non-sensitive information about that customer record such as name and phone number is stored in the cloud and used as a pointer to fetch sensitive information from a local database or a CRM application when the call is connected. All the management, reporting and analytics for the call center is still delivered from the cloud. Sensitive and confidential information such as call recordings are stored locally on customer premise instead of storing these in the cloud. This is possible because with a distributed architecture there is no centralized dialer operating in the cloud. Recordings are done on agent’s PC where the call processing is also done and the recordings are streamed to a local server for retrieval later on. If all this sounds like “just-in-time” security for call center SaaS, it is. And it is made possible by combining distributed computing with cloud computing services.

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What’s The Difference?: Cloud Computing Services, Hosted Services, Software as a Service (SaaS)

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Ever wonder what’s the difference between all these service types? They all deliver a service over the Internet cloud. Whether it is a backup or word processor application or a call center application, the customer is still using software and hardware resources of servers maintained by someone else. Traditionally, the customer was responsible for sizing the hardware and software resources, procuring the servers, installing and configuring the servers and maintaining these resources in a data center.

With hosted services, all these tasks are delegated to the provider of Saas or Cloud Computing Service. Since the SaaS provider has hundreds of customers, she may decide to house these customers on the same set of servers, using partitioning or virtualization. Server resources are efficiently utilized lowering the total cost of the service that is being delivered.

The customer only pays for what she uses and has the added flexibility of ramping up or down the number of subscribers using the service. It is easy to implement and get started, thus lowering the burden and dependency on the in-house IT staff. There are concerns about security and trust when you turn over your mission critical application to a service provider. There is additional worry about being locked into a service because it may be hard to move or migrate the application data from one provider to another or if the data needs to be brought in-house.

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