Cisco Commits to Supporting Its Legacy Contact Center Customers

Its enterprise CCaaS platform is also evolving, with its transition programs from Avaya and Genesys to Webex in full swing

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Cisco Commits to Supporting Its Legacy Contact Center Customers
Contact CentreInsights

Published: January 30, 2023

Charlie Mitchell

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: 

  1. 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. 
  2. Cisco Webex Contact Center EnterpriseHere, 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. 
  3. 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. 

As such, Webex is often ideal for an incremental cloud transformation, while it also supports those customers that wish to stay on-premises but want access to new innovations like digital channel support. 

“Only Cisco can deliver the combination of on-premises, dedicated instance, or a multi-tenant solution specific to the customer needs,” concludes Horton.  

Cisco Supports Avaya and Genesys Migrations

Cisco’s roadmap has resonated with many Avaya and Genesys customers disillusioned by the recent speculation revolving around both vendors.  

With such high demand, Cisco has developed formal Avaya and Genesys transition programs to better serve its new customers as they transition to Cisco-based solutions.  

Cisco has designed these to support end-to-end customer requirements, from selection to onboarding to deployment, launch, and support.  

According to Horton, such an approach should shorten time for deployment while accelerating each customer’s ROI. She adds: 

 Given that customer needs are unique, our transition programs are made available through our sales and partner channels, and we invite interested companies to contact our representatives today.

With Cisco, these contact centers can begin their migrations on their own terms, without disruption to their legacy hardware, fear of further cuts, and product limitations.  

Indeed, Cisco sits in a unique position where it can support everyone from SMBs wishing to add contact center tools to their UCaaS solutions to full-scale enterprise CCaaS migrations. 

Moreover, thanks to its extensive global presence, record revenues, and commitment to innovation, it does not have to worry about spreading its resources too thin.   

As such, expect big things from Cisco in the contact center space, especially after launching a ground-breaking partnership with Microsoft. The agreement will see the Webex Contact Center become available on Teams.   

Moreover, according to prominent industry analyst Dave Michels, this was “the biggest story of 2022” in enterprise communications.

 

 

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Brands mentioned in this article.

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