1. CosmoCom has been a proponent of hosted IP solutions as embodied in its flagship product, CosmoCall Universe™. What has been the market acceptance of the hosted approach? What are some of the most significant barriers that you have had to overcome?
We have had great market acceptance among the hosted service providers. Today the critical need for value added applications on new IP telecom infrastructure is apparent to every major telco in the world. Anyone who doubts this should have a look at this recent press release from Deutsche Telekom. The first killer application is IP Centrex or hosted IP PBX. The second is hosted IP contact center.
But you are probably asking about the acceptance of the end users, the customers of the service providers that invest in our platform. We are at the inflection point of that curve. We now have multiple major Service Providers like BT, FT, NTT, and PLDT having great success in the market, winning deals with major customers and seeing pipelines like they’ve never seen before. It has taken some time for this trend to reach critical mass, but we see it happening now, in the results and projections our SPs have shared with us, and in their orders.
2. Your company also offers on site solutions. How would you compare the number of CosmoCom hosted implementations with the number of on site solutions? What trends can you identify?
First, to be more precise, there is a continuum between hosted and on site solutions. The four points on that continuum are: shared hosted platforms, dedicated hosted platforms, managed services, and traditional on site solutions. Let’s distinguish between the shared platforms and all the others, which are variations on the theme of dedicated platforms.
We have a unique global leadership position in shared hosted platforms. More top-tier telcos by far are using our platform than any other similar product. There are hundreds of individual call centers running on all our service providers. We also have some very successful traditional resellers, especially BT in the UK and Nekotec in CALA. Our dedicated systems also number well over a hundred, and because some of them are very large, the total number of seats is roughly equal between shared hosted platforms and dedicated systems.
The most important trend we are seeing is that our major providers of shared hosted services, mostly the telcos, are recognizing the advantages of using the same technology for the various types of dedicated systems projects they undertake. We are winning more and more dedicated system deals through our service providers. Some of these are hybrid implementations that begin on the hosted platform and migrate in a planned way to dedicated systems. The availability of the hosted platform can get some of these project moving much faster than they could in any other way, even for the customers who know they want to move to a dedicated system. For the channel, having one technology that fits both markets is a huge advantage in terms of developing a practice and a skill set. We call this trend “convergence in the channel.”
3. What will be CosmoCom’s focus and direction for remainder of 2006 and 2007? What new products and services can we expect from CosmoCom?
Some of the most interesting developments you will see in the coming months relate to channels. I think we will see the “convergence in the channel” phenomenon working itself out in some fascinating ways. Our Service Providers have shared some of their plans with us, but it would not be appropriate for us to disclose them before they do.
We do have a new version of CosmoCall Universe, Version 5.0, coming out in November. It includes a significant upgrade of our email capabilities, and a breakthrough approach to reporting permissions, to name just two of the highlights. I don’t want to preempt the announcement too much here. But I will mention that the new permissions feature can match both real time and historical report information to almost any conceivable organizational structure, no matter how complex, hierarchical, or overlapping (matrix structure).
We are also very excited about the potential of the video contact center and of what we call IVVR, Interactive Voice and Video Response. Your readers can see a fascinating example of IVVR technology on CosmoCom’s web site. We have some pilots going that will blossom into full blown implementations in 2007. I just read a fascinating article by Chris Skinner about video contact centers in the financial industry. Financial services is just one market sector where call centers will be changing in response to the video megatrend.
We may have a few other surprises coming soon. This will have to be one of those “stay tuned” answers.
4. Has the transition to IP implementations gained acceptance to a point where it is not a question of “if”, but “when”? What have been your customers’ drivers for implementing such systems?
Certainly it’s no longer “if” but “when.” Probably the biggest single driver up to now has been virtualization. But it’s important to mention that virtualization can mean different things. We see many kinds of virtualization. The most basic is establishing a single system image across multiple sites. Some customers are going deeply into the home agent paradigm. Others virtualize to unify onshore and offshore sites. Still others are hosting their own outsourcers, giving them operational visibility and supplier flexibility they could not achieve in any other way. Each of these approaches to virtualization has its own set of benefits.
The up-and-coming driver is the trend to expanding the contact center beyond the so-called full time agents to include more and more of the knowledge workers across the entire enterprise. We have one big customer, an insurance provider in Germany, with about 1,500 seats in its formal call center and more than 13,000 seats in the extended informal call center. This is the new face of a customer-centric approach to business. We call this trend Unified Customer Communications. It’s the customer-facing side of the Unified Communications movement, and it’s going to have a tremendous impact on everything associated with our industry. I wrote an article on this subject your readers may be interested in.
5. Has the decision making process changed over the past few years? If so, how?
I don’t think the business decision making process has fundamentally changed. People still try to understand their total cost of ownership and look for a return on their investments. But the dynamics of the industry are changing, and so the inputs to the equations are changing. Our technology opens up many ways to reduce total cost of ownership and to create ROI opportunities. The big change that we have helped to bring about, of course, is the availability of shared platform hosted services that are functionally equal or superior to on site systems. But even the companies who prefer on site solutions are benefiting from using platforms like ours, which enable them to be their own service provider, hosting multiple contact center applications on one virtual platform.
6. What market sector/industries have been most receptive to your solutions?
The two sectors that have been most receptive to our solutions are telecom and utilities. These sectors are, first of all, huge consumers of contact center technology for the simple reason that they have so many customers. Second, while they tend to be conservative, pragmatic buyers rather than early adopters, they do keep a close watch on each others’ best practices, and when a technology is successful, it can move rapidly through the industry. In the case of telecom, our proximity to the industry because of our presence on the hosted platform side of the business has also been a positive factor.
That said, our technology, as offered through resellers and service providers, is fundamentally horizontal in nature and has applications wherever businesses have a need to communicate with customers on a large scale.
7. What is your approach to users of legacy systems?
Legacy customers usually start with some sort of an island in their contact center universe where they can try the new technology without having an immediate disruptive impact on what is, after all, a substantial investment that is still working for them. Sometimes this island is served by a hosted platform, and sometimes a premises one. Often the island is a virtual island, that is, a multi-site application where the benefits of IP technology are clear.
Legacy customers who find the benefits interesting can transition to our technology with an evolutionary strategy. The simplest form of this strategy is what we call, “cap, grow, and overflow.” The “cap and grow” part is pretty standard stuff, but the “overflow” means that excess traffic from the legacy system can be seamlessly routed to the new and growing environment. Some customers are using our platform in a mode that actually takes over the ACD and IVR functions from the legacy environment, but uses the legacy circuit switched environment and circuit phones for delivering the voice calls.
8. There have been many benefits for implementing IP solutions espoused by the IP contact center vendors. In reality, what are the most significant benefits that your users attribute to their IP implementations? What have been their greatest challenges?
Probably the greatest challenges are related to the overall VoIP network issues. There is a new skill set needed in this area, and organizations sometimes underestimate what they have to do to make it work. But this is a skill set that is propagating rapidly in IT departments all over the world, and we benefit from this trend. Improvements in our system such as the new NAT traversal mechanism we created, and increased cooperation among the vendors in the space, e.g. our partnerships and cross certifications with media gateway providers like Cisco and AudioCodes, softswitch providers like Sonus and Cirpack, and IP Centrex providers like Broadsoft and Sylantro, are addressing these challenges effectively.
I have already mentioned some of the key benefits our users are attributing to their implementations of our technology. Another recurring benefit we see is the ease and speed of application development and application integration on our platform. This is only indirectly related to the IP nature of our technology. There are two main factors behind the pleasant surprises our customers are experiencing in these areas.
First, implementing our system is nothing like a legacy CTI project. The IVR, the ACD, and the Agent Client are all facets of our unified technology. They talk to each other by their nature. You might say that CTI is built into our platform. The information about the call is fundamentally linked to the call. You don’t have to build your infrastructure around CTI middleware to make this link possible. People are consistently amazed at the headaches saved by this approach.
Of course, external integration is still needed. Contact center agents need to access and work with the back office applications. Since our system is fundamentally a standard information technology platform developed using the same software tools that other IT applications use, customers find these external integrations much easier than they did with the traditional CTI architectures.
Everyone in the industry claims to offer the benefits of ease and speed of application development and application integration. This makes these benefits more difficult to sell, and in fact we probably emphasize other benefits like virtualization and multi-tenancy more in our selling effort, because they are easier to communicate. We have won some deals by proving it – doing integrations in a few hours that the customer struggled to achieve for months with a legacy system. But often these benefits do take the form of “pleasant surprises” for our customers. We get a lot of feedback along the lines of “Wow, everyone talks about making this easier, but you guys really do it. This is much easier than we thought it would be.” We love to hear that.