OAISYS AllWays Vision and Gateway to the Cloud Offering

UCStrategies defines unified communications as communications integrated to optimize business processes. At first blush one naturally thinks of realtime communications, but this needn’t be the case. Integration of voice documentation can also facilitate enhanced collaborative efforts and be a difference-maker for business as well.

Voice documentation brings telephone conversations into the same communications tracking process as already exists for email and other forms of documents. If done right it gives every employee in the workflow access to review, organize, comment and share information created directly from their telephone conversations. Businesses can gain a competitive advantage by becoming more responsive, being faster to market and delivering a greater level of customer service because of fewer errors and communications inaccuracies.

Voice documentation also creates total accuracy. The conversation is directly captured, not summarized or paraphrased, so no element of communication is lost. The specific words, tone of voice, pauses, etc. are all included in the document. And non-verbal cues can be captured with video. This creates the benefit of seamless information transfer. When a document/video is shared there is never a question about the other party’s emotion, the details of the conversation or who said what to whom.

Voice documentation isn’t new. It’s a mainstay of contact center operation, sales force management and a fixture in industries such as: banking, financial trading, insurance, collections and emergency response that must document calls to comply with complex regulatory requirements. In summary the three key uses of voice documentation have been:

• —Risk Management: Document phone-based transactions to minimize liability risk and ensure regulatory compliance
  
  
• —Customer Retention: Gain insight into how customers are being treated, identify areas for improvement
  
  
• —Best Practices Identification: Increase revenues by sharing/promoting strong sales techniques and reducing negative practices.

Companies such as OAISYS, Interactive Intelligence, Telrex, Verint and VPI operate in this space. OAISYS and Interactive Intelligence have been active in looking beyond traditional contact center applications. This news analysis focuses on OAISYS’s recent announcement of its Gateway to the Cloud offering. An analysis of Interactive Intelligence will follow shortly.

OAISYS produces two solutions – Talkument for voice documentation compliance and Tracer for contact center management. Tracer has the same core feature set as Talkument, but with advanced capabilities for quality assurance, real-time coaching and personnel development including integrated live and automatic call monitoring with pause, rewind, fast forward and instant messaging. These solutions are sold into the SME market. Systems sold have an average port size of 50-60. From a volume standpoint, OAISYS produces a lot of systems that are in that 30-50 port range, though 50 percent of revenue is derived from systems over 100 ports – their break point for separating midmarket from small enterprise.

All OAISYS solutions are sold through the channels of their strategic network equipment provider (NEP) partners: Avaya, Mitel, ShoreTel, and Toshiba. In general, the NEPs act as distributors for OAISYS product sold under the OAISYS brand. OAISYS, itself, has an overlay channel. On a pre-sales basis the OAISYS overlay team engages in training partner sales staff, partnering in joint selling opportunities, responding to requests for quotes, demos and documentation. Post-sales, they honor sales channel requests for implementation support and direct Tier 1 support to customers.

In addition, OAISYS has relationships with SPs who have signed on to use BroadSoft as a service delivery platform to deliver Communications as a Service (CaaS) solutions. They’re also in various stages of relationship building with a few of those to be able to provide pure cloud-bases applications on top of CaaS. Reaching out to these SPs poses a major challenge as OAISYS must convince each SP that they offer the best recording-based solutions. By virtue of the investment necessary, every SP is essentially taking on an “exclusive” relationship with the Company regardless of whether or not it was deemed so upfront.

Talkument

Talkument personal voice documentation and collaboration software utilizes patent-pending OAISYS Portable Voice Document (PVD) technology to create digital media documents from business telephone calls (inclusive of desktop video), making them available to organize, retrieve, playback, annotate and share as needed. When a user shares a voice document, the recipient is notified and provided a link to the document, rather than a copy of the file itself (although users do have the option to convert PVD files to .wav, .mp3 or other formats should they desire). The Talkument UI provides a time map of the conversation which contains the original media and all of the metadata that’s known including extension numbers dialed, caller IDs and transaction IDs associated with order processing apps like Salesforce.com or Dynamics. Tools are also available to highlight, annotate, drag and drop a portion of the conversation – all important attributes for CEBP. And all annotations and highlights are preserved and stored in that PVD file as it would be in PDF of an original Word document.

In other words, Sandy can highlight a two minute portion of a call, add searchable text-based notes and forward it off to Bill and his team for action. Upon receipt, Bill doesn’t have to listen to what might amount to an hour long conversation. He can see that two-minute snippet that’s been highlighted for action. This simplifies his life because he can hear exactly what action is being requested, exactly what the sense of urgency is from the tone of voice and perhaps specifics on what needs to be done.

Media management options are available to promote privacy and security, including:

• Restricted Information Access: Call access limited by a combination of call data and filters and further restrictions, such as the ability to share calls, can also be assigned
  
  
• Digital Watermarking: Unique, proprietary digital signature embedded in each voice document verifies call integrity and authenticity
  
  
• Variable Data Lifecycle Management: Customized call storage, staging and purging based on a variety of criteria, such as account code, extension, caller ID and other forms of user data
  
  
• Call Slicing: Enables part of a single recording to be split into a separate file. For example, one long radio channel recording pertaining to two separate issues can be segmented accordingly.
  
  
• Call Merging: Users can merge two or more recordings into a single file.
  
  
• Call Redacting: Also known as “blurring” or “scrubbing,” this feature enables the ability to highlight a segment of the call audio and play silence over that portion.

Unfortunately translation to text is unavailable as that technology is not deemed mature enough at this time. However, prepackaged connectors are available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com which display links to recordings to/from any contact, account record or opportunity record in the CRM databases. No specific connectors are available for SharePoint at this time. But work has been done on the OAISYS internal SharePoint server to link and partition recordings out to either team sites or to a customer-specific workflow process within SharePoint.

An Internet Explorer (IE) plug-in is also available. It can be used to extract information from a Web app and attach it to a recording file as part of the PVD and do so automatically. It can also be used to trigger workflow integration for the purposes of starting and stopping a recording. This is particularly valuable in transaction processing where the Web app can be provisioned to automatically stop recording of credit card number and authorization codes in compliance with payment card industry’s data security standards.

Talkument and Tracer can be delivered as integrated hardware/software solutions provided either on an OAISYS recording appliance – an off-the-shelf, rack-mountable 1U appliance – or on OAISYS built-to-order servers with fault tolerance and data protection capabilities. Software-only solutions are available on a per-port, per-application basis. These solutions are certified VMware-ready and interoperable within a VMware vSphere environment. Unfortunately, neither OAISYS solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform. There are some of capabilities VMware enables that Microsoft Hyper-V platform does not, specifically related to realtime IP-based recording.

In press releases over the last month OAISYS has announced its approach (OAISYS AllWays) to delivering a full spectrum of call recording solution deployment options, including on-premise, pure cloud and hybrid cloud, as well as support for user access to applications and data across a range of devices. Through its Mobile Recall app, based on HTML5, OAISYS provides mobile Web access to call recordings without requiring a software download or installation on the access device, whether smartphone and tablet or PC. Mobile Recall provides same search and playback functions as the premise-based analogs, empowering the user to view desired interaction metadata, such as notes or transaction references and make use of that to efficiently and effectively interact with business processes. OAISYS is currently accepting a limited number of customers to participate in early adopter field trials of its Mobile Recall application.

The OAISYS Gateway to the Cloud solution enables companies with a preexisting investment in on-premise telephony systems to add OSISYS call recording and interaction management functionality in a hosted cloud environment. An on-premise OAISYS Cloud Gateway device captures voice conversations and associated call data from the customer’s premise-based PBX. Calls are initially stored locally, then uploaded on a scheduled, recurring basis to the OAISYS cloud-based managed services location. Users can access call records just as if they were stored locally. The service is provided on a month-by-month, pay-as-you-go basis.

What This Means to You

For Customers: OAISYS offers some nice recording-based solutions for contact-center and general business process management. These solutions can be purchased separately or as integrated components of broader NEP equipment platforms. Given that the channel partner selling Talkument and Tracer will likely be selling other certified interoperable competitive recording solutions it would be wise to look and compare what’s best in your particular situation.

From a cloud-based perspective, OAISYS has all bases covered with their AllWays approach. Businesses subject to strict regulatory mandates need to be cautious about the efficacy of storing recordings in the cloud. Some of the key questions that customers need to have answered are:

• Security: Can the same security available to on-premise applications be applied in the cloud?
  
  
• Compliance: Can applications in the cloud meet the same regulatory compliance requirements?
  
  
• Reliability and QoS: Can the same SLAs for reliability and QoS be met in the cloud, especially given the multi-tenant use of the underlying IT infrastructure?
  
  
• Control: Can application owners still have the same amount of control over their applications and the infrastructure supporting them in the cloud?
  
  
• Fear of vendor lock-in: Will use of a particular vendor for cloud services or infrastructure prevent use of a different one in the future, or will the enterprise’s data and applications be tightly locked into a particular model?
  
  
• Change in Productivity and Business Agility: How will this “UCaaS-type” solution serve to increase the productivity of my mobile workforce, increase my supply chain effectiveness and strengthen relationships with my customers?

For Partners: Under the AllWays strategy it’s critical for OAISYS to be working with SPs and their channels. To the extent that the NEP channel doesn’t support the SP, the NEP partner would likely take a hit to revenue and profit as sales take a cloud route. Where those channels are one and the same the major issue will be the shift in partner business model to accommodate the cash flow of a monthly residual-based nature as opposed to an upfront payment model. In support of sales of its Gateway to the Cloud solution, OAISYS will be positioning a channel partner compensation model that offers the choice to either take an upfront lump sum payment or a monthly residual payment. It is hoped that this strategy will give partners an incentive to start modifying their business models and begin embracing cloud-based sales and services without confronting an overnight change that may be financially painful.