Contact Centers in the CloudContact Centers in the Cloud

An Enterprise Connect session confirms that contact centers of all sizes are moving to the cloud.

Another day, another great contact center session. 8 am and we had an almost capacity crowd in Room Sun C to listen to four companies discuss both their service offerings and a series of case studies.

Paul Adams of Broadsoft led off the session; Broadsoft is the company behind the contact center offers of many carriers and end users. His case study on a charter vacation company highlighted one of the drivers of hosted for a lot of businesses--aging infrastructure. In the case of this company, a Rockwell ACD--can you say end of life?

Next up was Vin Deschamps of Echopass. One of his many great lines was, "Some refer to us as Genesys in the cloud. I prefer Echopass in the cloud." The comment highlights the fact that while Echopass uses a fair number of Genesys applications, they have also added a substantial amount of intellectual property that makes their offer unique.

Frank Maylett of inContact discussed several use cases, including 211, support.com and Trimble. Trimble uses inContact across 16 global offices and has integrated the inContact deployment with salesforce.com.

Finally, Joe Staples of Interactive Intelligence shared three use cases: Lilly, Shaw Floors and Brightpoint. The three highlight that contact centers of all sizes are moving to the cloud. Respectively, the companies have contracted for 100, 550 and 250 agent seats.

Not surprisingly, one of the questions from the audience addressed reliability, security and resilience. Vin provided a great response--all of these issues can be addressed at various levels. Companies decide with their wallets how important each of these issues is to them.