Connection Telecom’s cloud-based (hosted) voice offering takes off
Deepening value as provider introduces analytics, on-demand contact centres
Rapid growth
The market’s adoption of cloud based telephony continues to gather steam. Connection Telecom and its channel partners report rolling out a thousand new sites in the last year, and expect existing customers to double this tally in the current year.
Dave Meintjes, MD of Connection Telecom says the trend will bring another wave of change that will benefit businesses and hosted telecommunications providers in general.
“Just as the Internet transformed communication in 1997, hosted telephony will transform business telephony in 2012 – only faster,” he says.
“The cloud-based PBX vendors that are able to improve existing site survivability offer quality network access that supports voice well, and achieve a reduced total cost of ownership will steal a march on vendors that only deal with elements of this value proposition.”
He says Connection Telecom is set to double its number of sites and extensions by the end of the year, in line with market adoption of the new hosted telephony service model.
Value-add
Meintjes says market demand remains high, especially in the application space. Connection Telecom has introduced a number of value-added products to cater for this.
On-demand call centre (ODCC)
The first is its on-demand call centre, for firms with a medium-sized call centre requirement or the need to field or make calls in groups – for example during a marketing campaign. This complements the standard PBX, as most large companies have limited call centre activities alongside their standard telephony needs.
“An ODCC can rapidly meet the core functionality and capacity needs of the average call centre without the upfront investment of on-site equipment, and can scale up and down flexibly by virtue of being hosted and virtualised,” says Meintjes. “This can greatly shorten the time to market for new call centres and decrease their cost.”
Analytics
In addition, Connection Telecom has forged a co-development and integration agreement with QlikView, a pioneering business intelligence vendor. Using Qlikview, the telco has created analysis models that provide customers with unprecedented insight into usage on their Telviva-hosted PBXs, says Steve Davies, Technical Director of Connection Telecom.
“Where a customer has multiple branches on Telviva, all call data across those branches is effortlessly integrated,” he says. “Even ‘failover’ calls are completely integrated. Customers can access numerous analyses at a glance, showing usage trends over time, individual dialled number analysis, sources of incoming calls, and so on.”
Davies says by comparison with static reports from telephone management systems, Connection Telecom’s QlikView-based system provides powerful analytics accessibly, giving customers the most value from their Telviva hosted PBX systems. Telviva resellers can quickly see similar analyses, showing their profitability.
The right mix
For various reasons, the market has reached a tipping point of accepting cloud-based PBX solutions in all configurations. Providers that offer a quality, reliable service, flexible scalability and the right mix of value-add products, will gain the ascendancy.
* Public cloud implementations reside in off-site data centres owned by the service provider. (SP) Private cloud implementations reside in customer-owned data centres, hosted by the customer or the SP, on- or off-site. Hybrid implementations reside in customer-owned data centres, and calls are carried out via virtual private network via a public switch.
