I was recently looking over an article on “5 KPIs to Evaluate Cloud and Managed Hosting Providers” with a simple question: how does CtiPath’s Cloud Hosted offering measure-up to the KPI’s in that article? Being that this article was written by a respectable engineer/director over at AT&T, my first reaction was to try and puff up my chest and respond in kind (that’s how some of us CCIE’e are ;-). But as I sat and considered my response, I came to the conclusion that our hosted offering is great because it is some of what AT&T’s offering is and is not. Let’s take a look:

 

KPI 1 – The service catalog is too narrowly defined …how we are different than this and why it is so great?

We are strong believers in becoming really good at one or two things and sticking to it. Because of this, we focus only (or at least mostly) on Cisco-powered collaboration products. I know it sounds narrow, but contact center is actually deceptively complex. It’s more than just about the products themselves, it’s about everything they touch. Since contact center oftentimes sits at the heart of an organization’s support infrastructure, it’s inevitably tied in with a myriad of other systems, from CRMs to order management systems, to backend APIs. Thus, our initial “narrow” focus becomes much larger, but not too large: time and time again, we’ve proven that our team has the know-how to get the job done, from one end to the other.

 

KPI 2 – The vendor doesn’t have a defined cross-tower on-boarding team …this I completely agree with, but how many companies actually do this?

Our service team’s primary skill and purpose is to normalize the business and tech requirements to best practice standards. These standards are directly in line with allowing for the smooth transition from self-managed and owned to shared/fully managed and/or hosted. In short, this is what we do – get you to the cloud (or at least on the way there) with some level of expert management.

 

KPI 3 – Will the Provider step up and accept the corner cases? …massive companies like AT&T can do this by working with companies like ours. We work this way everyday with a team of less than 25 and have delivered on many AT&T sponsored projects.

The very nature of contact center design is to provide “one-offs” for every customer. The success points in being able to balance that with low/no cost and short time-frames is to settle on both; a platform that supports this with out-of-the-box features like rapid customization, and an application development team that knows how to leverage that along with minimal glue code that pushes the UX into the top 4% of what other providers can deliver.

 

KPI 4 – Engineering Gravity …Todd Cupit (AT&T) couldn’t have said it any better “Quite frankly, I have never understood why Cloud and Managed Hosting providers aren’t more organized like system integrators as opposed to ISPs”.

Nearly every person that is a part of CtiPath is from some kind of integrator background. If not, we quickly get them on the right path. And some of us are from both sides of the street. I my self worked as a CTO for at a BPO for over 4 years and our head of product development has designed and delivered OEM products for Cisco and lead many other development teams. It’s a simple process we follow:

– Get to know the customers business very well
– Design a solutions with near perfect balance between business and tech requirements and budget
– Implement it in days, not weeks, on our platform
– Test that the main elements are in alignment: User Experience, business and tech requirements
– Cut-over to full production
– Constantly monitor and measure that all elements are within SLAs

 

KPI 5 – Does the provider support a Common Cloud Management Platform? …I believe I covered that in the first KPI, Cisco powered.

This is the main reason we settled our careers and choice of technology for our hosted platform on Cisco. To throw out a few tech buzz words (you can read more about why Cisco Collaboration here):

– Cisco
– SIP VoIP
– XML and SOAP
– Runs on and off of VM Ware
– Elegant configuration interface
– Point and click/”throw another box at it” scalability

 

In conclusion – Just ask anyone one of our partners or customers and they will tell you: we are able to deliver on these KPI’s with a team of well focused engineers, support, and sales professionals.