The biggest concerns local businesses have around the cloud relate to reliability and security, says Ocular Technologies. Many of these concerns are valid, particularly for the contact centre sector, so in bringing to market the new O!Connect cloud contact centre solution, Ocular has gone to great lengths to overcome them.
Pommie Lutchman, CEO of Ocular Technologies, explains key questions around any platform hosted outside the country's borders are the costs, the legal implications of data crossing borders, and latency and reliability. "O!Connect is powered by Aspect Software's Zipwire platform, which is a secure, flexible and proven platform currently in use by around 4 000 users in top companies in the US and elsewhere in the world. So O!Connect is built on a 100% uptime platform. However, since we are currently using only one Internet Solutions (IS) data centre, we guarantee 99.999% uptime," he says.
Addressing another cloud concern, Lutchman says: "Moving data across borders does raise costs, and it can raise compliance concerns. In addition the potential latency involved in using a platform hosted in the US, for example, can impact the customer experience in a contact centre environment. A few seconds of latency when you are adding information to a form hosted elsewhere is not a significant problem. But when it comes to voice interactions, you cannot afford even a 200-millisecond delay."
By partnering with IS, Ocular Technologies leverages IS's extensive and trusted infrastructure across SA to keep data within the country's borders. This not only controls costs, but also ensures latency issues do not impact the real-time communications running through O!Connect. "IS has exceptional capabilities and reach across South Africa, so this limits latency and allows for improved response times. As a value channel partner of IS, Ocular Technologies is also in a position to assist our customers with hosting space, ADSL and VDSL and last-mile connectivity, to enable them to benefit from the O!Connect solution," says Lutchman. He says IS is enthusiastic in its support of the new O!Connect cloud contact centre solution, and is helping to keep associated costs as low as possible. "IS is as innovative and pioneering in hosting space as we are in contact centre space," he says.
With its no-risk try-before-you-buy model, O!Connect also eliminates the risk of buyer's remorse. Potential customers can simply register for a 30-day free trial at www.ocularcloud.com.
Should customers choose to register for one of the O!Connect suites, billing will take place automatically on the same day each month, and payment is made securely through the O!Connect platform.
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