Gartner forecasts revenue from 2020 cloud computing to exceed $266 billion. AWS has led the market for over a decade, but the pandemic’s created a rise in other tech firms joining AWS in increased cloud adoption. IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Microsoft Azure all capture a part of the cloud market share, although Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) dominates the exchange.
Microsoft recently won a $10 billion bid with the U.S government, and IBM spent $34 billion on the acquisition of RedHat to boost its cloud proposition in July 2019. A 2018 callcenterhelper.com survey of 350 contact center professionals found that sixty percent of those individuals had migrated to the cloud from on-premises infrastructure.
The same survey found, 39 percent of respondents weren’t considering migrating to the cloud at all. Homeworking – the reason 12 percent of professionals stated they wanted to make the move. Another 22 percent cited cost-effectiveness as a benefit of the technology and a motivation to modernize their organization’s technology stack.
Among the survey’s other findings, 38 percent of those who responded said they felt the cloud wasn’t reliable. Today, with the current state of affairs, global protests as well as the novel Coronavirus pandemic, what was 15 percent of the U.S. workforce who worked from home before the pandemic, has reached over 50 percent of Americans working from home.
This contributed to a higher demand for cloud services, which could mean that 60 percent may be much higher given the status quo. Here’s where I pick up with Matthew Lawlor, CTO, Spearline, who shared about the importance of phone number and quality testing.
“You have to test toll and toll-free numbers as well as set up management alerts for non-functioning numbers. If you’re not monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and reporting – you don’t have perfect number performance”
He added this is all linked to creating consistent customer and employee experiences. “Tests should emulate every aspect of a call flow, from connectivity to audio quality, and DTMF functionality.” Call detail record info, as well as testing audio, forces ownership of carrier issues, and could reduce downtime along with expediting carrier root cause analysis, I’m told.
Others seem to take a liking to VoIP services over that of having a dedicated cloud environment for workplace communication and collaboration, “Many people have already done this for years without realizing, Skype and Webex are great examples of how.” According to Lawlor.
He added, there are some pitfalls when it comes to VoIP, citing research from a survey of those who switched from SIP to VoIP. That survey found, 46 percent of companies that use VoIP services have experienced one-way audio issues, with 23 percent saying they endured having no audio at all.
Forty percent of those who answered said they had poor audio quality in the form of jitter, latency, and clipping. Lawlor added, no matter the delivery method – testing is a must. It also enables enterprises and call centers to benefit from the flexibility of the cloud while leveraging high uptimes for critical communications and workplace collaborations software.
