West Interactive Adds an On-Premises, Managed Services Option
Recognizing that new customer engagement models engender increased complexity, West Interactive has rounded out its IVR offerings by adding a premises-based, managed service option. The offer is very much in concert with love/hate relationship that businesses display toward “The Cloud” (be it “public” or “private”) and the existence of a broad spectrum of service-based offerings (Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, just as examples).
West’s approach captures the spirit of Recombinant Communications (RC) by making it simpler for companies to preserve and extend the service lives of the resources that work well for them, meaning premises-based servers that perform speech-processing, call-processing and self-service applications. At the same time, it lays the foundation for them to incorporate or “splice in” the latest technologies, tools, data and meta-data that make Conversational Commerce within reach. That’s how West’s managed, on-premises model a transformational product (or service) fits the need for companies to lean on 3rd parties take the risk out plans to take advantage of what is now called “The Cloud,” but could, just as accurately be thought of as hosted services. Thus it will accelerate the transformation to cloud-based instantiation of self-service while maintaining flexibility in their deployment strategy and maintaining the resilience of their time-tested on-premises solutions.
With its new, managed services approach, West supports the “hybrid” deployment strategies that are becoming commonplace in these very dynamic times.
Thanks for the comment, Jack. I have a different view. Our figures show West to be among the top three in outsourced voice applications, but that growth comes from closer integration with business processes and “Big Data” that often resides inside a company’s firewall. All competitors for integrated self-service and assisted service have to have solutions that span both premises-based and cloud-based options. A fundamental change is taking place in customer facing IT and contact center architectures driven by large companies looking at “The Cloud,” where West has its strength, while not abandoning their existing solutions.
1. If West is in the top 3, we would certainly be interested in the two others which your analysis produced to round out the top 3.
2. Any real enterprise solutions have to be wonderfully integrated and leverage enterprise data and I don’t see any scenarios where this “Big Data” would reside outside of the company firewall. This is simply table stakes.
3. The leading solution providers leverage not only the disparate collections of customer data, but interaction data (both from within and from channels outside of the IVR) to influence the degree of personalization, the ability to predict intent and to influence dynamic call flows.
4. I agree that top vendors must offer both an on-premise solution and a hosted solution and that interest in “the cloud” continues to grow. The challenge that I see, however, is that these are most often two different solutions from the same vendor. The leadership position goes to the vendors who actually deliver the old Sun “write once, run anywhere” mantra and can aim a single application set at both a unique customer premise infrastructure as well as a different hosting platform. True customer choice, portability and single set of tools to manage the solution, regardless of the delivery methodology. It’s an “IT-taming” position.
We put West Interactive in tier with Convergys, Microsoft/Tellme and ITC/Sykes. But we may be using a different metric. You seem to be saying that the market goes to the really big System Integrators who may be adding speech applications to their managed services and we’re only seeing a little bit of that. But I will say that the notion that Big Data won’t reside outside the firewall just doesn’t appear to be true. My empirical observation is that some of the largest implementations of ERP (like SAP) have been outsourced to third parties and, whether it’s banking, insurance, pharma, travel or what-have-you data may physically reside on “virtual” servers in India, the Philippines or anywhere that the price is right.
OK, you officially lost me here. We have different definitions of “big data” regardless of where it resides.
More interesting is your list of the top three voice applications providers. And no, I am certainly not taking the position that the market is going to the big integrators. Just the opposite seems to be happening if you are looking for real innovation and leading edge solutions. Regardless of how challenging their engagements may be or their market perception, I don’t recall seeing a list of top speech applications providers that didn’t include Nuance. Microsoft/Tellme delivers their speech self-service almost exclusively with a strategic partner. And Voxify seems to have gained considerable analyst attention and has been credited with some of the most innovative deployments in the industry.
Probably very different criteria, but always interesting to see how others see this market and its leaders evolving.