Publications
Partners
Cape Town - “There can be no doubt that businesses have to
employ technology if they hope to compete,” says Rob Lith, Director of
Connection Telecom. “When it comes to investing in cloud computing and
virtualisation, the return on investment may very well be the ability to remain
in business.”
Lith says there three trends driving businesses are:
1. VoIP and mobile telephony
According to a 2008 BMI-TechKnowledge study there is a
decrease in the number of landlines being installed, with big implications for
telephony. The trend is not alarming - in developed countries, landlines have
decreased by almost 10% since 2001. On the other hand, there has been a 13.7%
increase in ADSL subscribers to 795 000. In other words, while fixed line
penetration is waning, ADSL is growing in absolute numbers and as a percentage
of fixed line installations.
By and large, the gap will be filled by mobile and wireless
solutions, but also by networked voice (VoIP) offerings from a plethora of
alternative telcos with VoIP making increasing inroads in South Africa.
2. The rise of on-demand call centres
Virtualisation has meant that call centres are able to grow
or shrink their agent pool according to demand, without resource concerns such
as bandwidth and scale of application support. For call centres to be able to
compete, changes must happen at the speed of business without being charged for
excess capacity.
Business will have to access this elasticity (provided by
virtualization) to compete, partnering with companies that deliver bandwidth
and application resources as a managed service.
3. Cloud computing
This ties into the consolidation of data centre resources -
allowing not only call centres but other enterprises to take advantage of the
ease of management and improved utilisation of standard, rationalised
infrastructure. This has several spinoff advantages; including the ability to
deploy a small IT team to manage the much smaller, standardised data centre
footprint, as well as a smaller carbon footprint.
Virtualisation can further be deployed on the client’s
premises by simply slotting into the client’s virtual environment, with the
benefit of greater control over infrastructure for the client.
Technology equips companies with the ability to lower
operational overheads, optimise capacity and control their existing resources
more effectively.
The question isn’t whether you should be investing in the technology, but when to invest, Lith says.
*Follow Fin24 on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
