Interactive Intelligence Provides Alternative Upgrade Path

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both… Robert Frost

Cisco Unified Contact Center, both in the Express and Enterprise flavors (UCCX or UCCE), is a solid product that meets the contact center needs for many customers.

However, the needs of contact centers evolve and grow as business expands and then customers look for increased capabilities and features. Common additions could involve outbound predictive dialing, the need to record customer conversations, or the desire to route and include in the agent workflow additional communication modalities such as instant messaging and email along with traditional voice calls.

These additional capabilities can be added directly to Cisco UCCX or UCCE, often through third-party products; however, with apologies to the poet Robert Frost, it does indeed appear there are multiple paths through the “upgrade woods.”

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brad Herrington, Senior Manager Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence and he notes that customers looking to add capabilities to Cisco contact centre products sometimes find a more straightforward “path” is to upgrade and enhance contact center capabilities by changing platforms.

While at first this may sound like a challenging transition, Cisco customers looking to increase capabilities by moving from the UCCE/UCCX 7.x platform to UCCX 8.x or 9.x already face a major platform change as Cisco re-architected its contact center platform to move away from Windows Server and SQL Server towards Linux and the Informix database. This means that customers using custom reporting applications or wallboard displays may already encounter and need to address integration issues when upgrading. Therefore, it only makes sense to consider other platforms if your upgrade path is already forcing you to change.

The Interactive Intelligence platform is based on Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server which means that in-house platform skills are potentially better leveraged even when transitioning to another vendor’s product.

Additionally, Interactive Intelligence offers both an on-premises and cloud-based solution for contact centers and was architected to be a single fully-integrated solution designed to support all the different customer interaction channels. The cloud-based option allows customer to shift capital expenditure to operational expense, and perhaps more importantly, can shift much of the technical operational complexity outside the organization. The Interactive Intelligence focus on “bundling” means that if the solution is aligned with your organizational needs, all of the required capabilities are included and supported by one vendor.

According to Brad, Interactive Intelligence is a part of the Cisco Developer Network and as such their solution is certified with the Cisco voice solutions. In addition, their solution integrates with a large number of other vendor products, including Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime, most of the leading hosted and on-premises CRM platforms and a number of other third-party workforce optimization and workforce management solutions.

Regular UCStrategies readers know that I am a strong advocate of documenting and prioritizing business requirements and then evaluating multiple viable options against these prioritized business requirements. Keeping this approach in mind, I would make the following recommendations for organizations evaluating their contact center needs:

1. If you are running Cisco UCCE or UCCX in your contact center and it is meeting your business needs, then stick with what you have.
   
   
2. If you are looking to add outbound predictive dialing capabilities or call recording to an existing Cisco contact center environment, evaluate the Interactive Intelligence platform as one possible alternative.
   
   
3. If you are planning an upgrade from Cisco contact center 7.x to 8.x or 9.x, ensure that any custom reports, wallboard or other integrated applications are not negatively impacted by the underlying architectural changes Cisco has made.  If auxiliary applications are impacted, consider the Interactive Intelligence product.
   
   
4. If you are upgrading from Cisco contact centre 7.x to 8.x or 9.x, ensure that your internal IT staff has Linux and Informix database expertise.

The ever-increasing number of unified communications and contact center options means that organizations need to choose their path wisely lest they get caught in the thorny pricker bush of technology.