The days of in-house contact centers that answer your customer service calls may be limited now that VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) can handle the same tasks dedicated systems used to do. Longtime call center vendor Avaya has begun turning to cloud computing for a few large enterprise deployments. With their shifting focus onto smaller businesses, Avaya is now hosting its contact-center software on the Google Cloud and sending out Chromebooks to customer service agents will talk and text with customers.

This move was announced at the Enterprise Connect 2015 conference in Orlando this week. The program is called Customer Engagement OnAvaya Powered by Google Cloud Platform, and it comes with a subscription-based license and the Customer Engagement OnAvaya software. It is expected to be priced at $140 per month, with details of what exactly this price includes still being hashed out.

Market research firm Frost and Sullivan reported that the cloud contact center market is growing at almost twice the rate of on premises-based contact center systems, which leads Avaya to believe this program came at the perfect time. Avaya believes their new service will be able to scale up in order to meet seasonal demands, and can support business continuity and remote agent strategies. In other words, the program makes it possible to maintain current on-site contact center agents as well as hire more agents that can work from anywhere.

Many contact center agents already work from home, though there exists security risks when not using proper technology. Through the Chromebook distribution of this program, companies can ensure that the devices used for work are used for that purpose alone. Avaya is focusing more and more on unified communications, enterprise Relevant Products, Services mobility, videos, contact centers, and cloud technologies.

The post Avaya-Google Partnership On Cloud-Based Contact Center appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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After 27 years at the top, it remains a slight culture shock to note Larry Ellison as Oracle’s chief technical officer. But despite this he’s still stealing the headlines, by telling analysts in an earnings call his belief that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce in 2015.

As reported by Seeking Alpha, Ellison told analysts in prepared remarks: “On our last quarterly conference call, I predicted that in our fiscal year 2016 Oracle would likely sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce.com. I was way too cautious and conservative – our cloud business is growing a lot faster than even I expected.

Ellison added: “I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015. It’s going to be close, but I think we’re going to sell more in the cloud than they do this year.

“I suspect that might come as a big surprise to a lot of people out there,” he noted. “You won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this.”

It’s big talk, as you’d expect. But do the financial figures back this up?

Well, it depends how you see it. Total SaaS and PaaS revenues went up 30% to $372m, while IaaS revenues went up 28% to $155m. Significantly though, this still only represents 6% of all revenues. Software and cloud represents more than three quarters of all money coming in, but the vast majority of that is tied up in software license updates and product support (50%) and new software licenses (21%). Total revenues, of $9.3bn stayed flat overall, but were up 6% in constant currency.

Oracle seems fairly happy with the results. Safra Catz, co-CEO, said the company was “very, very pleased” with the results, while co-CEO Mark Hurd described it as a “very solid quarter…and a great cloud quarter for Oracle.” The tech giant added nearly 800 brand new SaaS customers in the quarter, while more than 500 existing customers expanded their cloud services.

But how does this compare with Salesforce, who announced another billion dollar quarter and $5bn in annual revenue back in February? Tim Beyers, of the Motley Fool, noted at the time the disparity between balance growth and deferred revenue, which “could suggest the company is having a tougher time signing the sorts of lucrative, multi-year deals [CEO Marc] Benioff wants.”

Ellison said it would be close. Watch this space to see how close Oracle gets.

Temasys has announced senior management additions to its team. Joining are David Holloway as Vice President of Commercial and Nadine Yap as Vice President of Product.
Over the past 12 months Temasys has doubled in size as it adds new customers and expands the development of its Skylink platform. Skylink leads the charge to move WebRTC, traditionally seen as a desktop, browser based technology, to become a ubiquitous web communications technology on web and mobile, as well as Internet of Things compatible devices.

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While errors and logs are often instrumental to diagnosing application issues, getting the most out of them isn’t easy. If you’re using a narrowly focused tool or rolling your own solution, it’s likely you’re either struggling to quickly get to the data you need when you need it, or you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack. Learn how to make sense of all this data in this interesting blog.

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Given the current global furor over continuing data breaches, Edward Snowden disclosures, the hue and cry around NSA data collection from mobile phones and mobile encryption, now is a good time to stop and think before we plunge wholesale into even more extensive collection of personal information from IoT environments and devices.

Think how much worse a breach of data could be if it includes full profiles of people’s movements, actions, eating habits, purchase preferences or even more personal information. Consider at the same time the potentials for abuse if this information is improperly handled or made available.

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In today’s digital word it is urgently critical that we are constantly monitoring the performance of our networks efficiency. If we don’t maintain the highest levels of IT network processing efficiency than we trigger the results of “poor performance, lost effectiveness and client dis-satisfaction”. Processing power, and speed, are requirements for doing business and keeping customers satisfied, whether they be your internal customers or your online external customers. If a business cannot complete fast and easy business interactions then the business will suffer with clients giving up and going somewhere else. As the opening sentence states, the key is to know what to monitor, develop a monitoring road-map and then to implement it. While businesses almost always monitor their the uptime of their website they all too often don’t follow through in their plan by monitoring the underlying infrastructure components and this is a critical flaw. It isn’t enough just to be connected anymore, today’s world demands connecting fast and processing at the highest performance. Don’t ever let them see or even sense that your network is having issues!

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Years ago companies saw a major improvement in efficiency in the heyday of virtualization. As the world looked to the cloud to solve business challenges these savings were forgotten. Today we live in a post cloud world with pre-virtualization efficiencies.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Jordan Jacobs, VP of Products at SingleHop, will discuss the common mistakes that as many as 90% of companies are making utilizing public clouds, what are causing these problems and how to avoid them.

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