Many rising trends are making CCaaS migrations more attractive.
Indeed, CCaaS players are adding new cloud capabilities at a rate of knots. AI’s potential to drive ROI is rising. And the need for rapid innovation is growing as the strategic value of CX heightens.
These are all excellent examples. Nevertheless, many contact centers have held their ground, causing some legacy vendors to take new steps in pushing their customers to the cloud.
This trend has not escaped the attention of Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. She noted:
Brands came out and said: "I’m not going to put any innovation on this [legacy solution]. I’m going to kill this very soon, or – as a business – I’m going to implode."
Genesys is perhaps the most prominent example, recently announcing the end of its legacy innovation and culling its hybrid cloud platform.
Thankfully, Cisco has proven resilient.
Leveraging its extensive global resources, Cisco’s business model allows it to innovate across three separate contact center offerings. These are:
- Cisco’s On-Premises Contact Center – Bundling legacy hardware and software, this option allows businesses to deploy, manage, and customize an enterprise-grade contact center.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise – Here, Cisco wraps its legacy Unified Contact Center Enterprise solution with new microservices. It also adds Webex Connect, allowing its customers to use CPaaS tools to innovate quickly. Customers can do this while keeping much of their data on-premise.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center – Powered by the Webex Platform, the public cloud solution allows businesses to converge their UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. It also contains CPaaS on the back end for speedy innovation, possesses many native capabilities – including AI, analytics, and WFO tools – and boasts a booming ecosystem of third-party business systems.
In pushing forwards with this portfolio, Cisco enables its customers to operate completely on premise, entirely in the cloud, or to utilize the best elements of both.
Making this point, Lorrissa Horton, SVP/GM & CPO of Webex Software Collaboration, states:
Cisco affirms its commitment to supporting our on-premises based calling and contact center portfolio and enabling migration to our dedicated instance cloud offering, Webex Contact Center Enterprise, as well as to our multi-tenant cloud offering, Webex Contact Center.
Cisco Meets the Needs of On-Premise Customers
In making this commitment, Cisco recognizes that a significant chunk of its customer base remains reluctant to switch to the cloud.
As such, it does not wish to force their hands. Instead, with this go-forward plan, it accepts many of the real concerns that its customers have regarding CCaaS migrations.
Perhaps the most significant is the sheer scale of the task as businesses attempt to free up flexibility and resources. Also, as Horton states:
Some large enterprises are running mission-critical contact centers with existing and very mature workloads. For these enterprises, a full cloud migration can be viewed as potentially risky, costly, and disruptive to the business.
Then, there are regulatory concerns. For instance, laws in particular countries prevent storing call recordings in the cloud.
In addition, many legacy contact centers outside the US are hesitant to store customer data in a US cloud, such as AWS, Azure, and Google. Why? Because the US government withholds the right to seize that data.
Thankfully, the Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise platform can allay many of these fears, enabling IT managers and organizations to determine their migration roadmap across on-premises, private cloud-based instances, or full multi-tenant cloud-based solutions. This approach differentiates Webex Contact Center from other market leaders – including Genesys, NICE, and Five9 – which only offer public cloud platforms.