A lot of people keep asking differences between Hosted and Premises based solution.
Basically a premise based solution is one where the technology is residing in your premises. There by you can own the technology but also have to maintain it. So you will need a IT Dept to manage the solution for you.
A Hosted technology is where the application is located remotly in some data center and is distributed through Internet. This is possible for International Centers only as in India VoIP at this level is still not allowed.
A few hosted providers that I came across are:
- Five9 (Recently pulled operations from India)
- Touchstar
- DACX from Drishti
- Aspect (A Reseller provides hosted service)
- Vicidial based solutions
You have to sign up on a monthly leased basis and voIP may or may not be billed inclusive. Consider legal issues also. I am not sure if five9 has a voip license also in india.
In general if you are a small timer wanting to experiment in this buisness without getting into lot of tech issues go for hosted as IT is not a major hassle there but as always there is a cost involved to it.
November 26, 2007 at 7:39 am
Yes i agree that there are a lot of cons associated with the choice of hosted model but the following may fall in the category with and thus act as cons of a virtual call center
1) Any bandwidth fluctuation in your network or an RTO may disappear the dial tone and thus hamper the calling unless until an auto re connection or a manual reconnection betweent the remote and the customer end servers viz host and clients
2) through the above mentioned point a dedicated bandwidth line is a must for smooth functioning which involves high cost in terms of IPLC or TDM connectivities which is seldom a choice of new players unsure regarding returns
3) From a longer time frame viewpoint a hosted model is a no no for entrepreneurs resulting in 10-15 times the premised base cost in an year and increasing exponentially
for ex if a premised based technology capex is 5 lacs and a hosted setup on opex model is 1 lac per annum the cost is covered in 5 months merely and rest all are extra expenses
4) In the game of low capex and only opex the cost of setting up is in anyways involved in purchasing a voip gateway router modem etc along with the generic hardware
5) In order to gain a low capex advantage entrepreneurs often misjudge the advantage of an asset creation rather then living in a fools paradise on operating on a low cost
6) Yesterdays companies offer a hire purchase model or tenured payment flexibilities due to competition where in the customer can quit or own during anytime of the tenure when the call center model becomes stable
7) We have more than 150 customers 80 % of which began with a rental premised model and later converted to a premised based when they were sure of the returns from their respective clients and also vise versa.. some of them quit after returning the hardware and getting their deposits refunded by merely paying a rental of around 100 dollars per seat per month when they found the BPO activities are not their cup of tea.
Kartikey Sharma
BDM, ITG INDIA
+91-9314800061
November 26, 2007 at 7:41 am
We Offer all 3 modes possible in Hosted Rental premised/Hire Purchase and Premised based models for hardware based contact center operation mdoels
November 30, 2007 at 10:47 am
I agree with most points mentioned by you Mr Sharma. In india specially when IT manpower is cheap hosted or SAAS in general will take time to take off.
The real advantage will come when application scenarios are dynamically changing and one would want a managed solution. Look at what orange business services or for that matter reliance is planning.
I am waiting for a day when google launches a Enterprise communications suite on network.
January 5, 2008 at 10:34 am
We that is Telesynergy or itgindia tried exploring the soft switch based dialer based on asterisk majorly based on vicidial by designing our own application and also tying up with the existing vendors but the experience was not good as the product is cheap but not only non reliable but impossible to produce a flawlless system and thus a satisfied customer.
When we launched our soft dialer and sold it to some customer and it ended up giving us lots of issues and problems which led us to come back on our USP through which we managed to sell our hardware based call center solution to our 150 satisfied companies throughout india.
We are still successfully selling ou hard dialer in india and abroad in hosted premised and renal models.
You can call me for any further details on 0091 9314800061.
Regards,
Kartikey Sharma
BDM, ITG INDIA
+91-9314800061
biz_itg on yahoo,msn and skype