Contact Center Technical Architect
2020 is over. And while it was an unprecedented year, the As a Service companies like Five9 helped make the widespread adoption of remote work a reality. For more As a Service information, check out my other blog series. Learn how CDW can assist with your collaboration solutions and services needs. It takes a catastrophic…
Welcome to the third part of this blog series, where I’ve been exploring the options available in the cloud contact center space. A quick recap of who we have talked about in this series: The first post was on the power of RingCentral, the second was showing off the red-hot Five9. Learn how CDW can…
[sayit]The public cloud hasn’t yet become the most popular place to host a customer engagement center — but it will. The shift is inevitable, as the benefits of migrating a customer engagement center to the public cloud are simply too powerful to ignore. Learn about CDW's Amplified Workspace Services. The move can bring many of…
More and more organizations are looking to migrate services to the cloud and toward a more OPEX subscription billing experience — but how does that change affect the contact center? As the contact center technical architect for CDW’s research and development group, I spend much of my time looking at products and determining where they…
[sayit] As more companies look to migrate services to the cloud and embrace OPEX subscription billing, how does this relate to the contact center? As the contact center technical architect of CDW’s research and development group, I spend all my time looking at products and where they fit. Cloud contact center has been at the…
In my first blog in this series about Network Time Protocol (NTP), I defined the relevant terms of this often-overlooked networking function. My second blog walked through the various NTP configurations options. This final blog will help you get started on the right foot by sharing both good and bad sources for NTP servers so…
In my previous blog post in this series on Networking Time Protocol (NTP), I provided the definitions of terms that I’ll be using in this post to discuss the different configurations that are in use. When working with NTP, the guiding principle is known as Segal’s law. Segal’s law states, "A man with a watch…
In this fast-paced world we work in, one of the things that is often overlooked on the network is, oddly enough, time. Time is critical in the function of all things on the network and, with the addition of services, it becomes even more critical. Inaccurate time on the network means inaccurate time on devices…
Enterprise Connect 2019 recently concluded, and what was the big theme this year? Cloud Contact Center was front and center. Everyone from the up-and-comers to the big boys had announcements in this space. It was by far the largest Enterprise Connect so far, and there was great participation from all the vendors. So, without further…
Cisco Systems flagship Contact Center products, Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) and Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) have not had a major release for a while now. That is about to change in 2019: Due out mid-January, these products will release v.12. As the consolidation happens and the two products move closer together in features…
Cisco Systems’s flagship Contact Center solution, including both Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) and Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), has had but one certified solution for its product on the automatic speech recognition/text-to-speech and voice biometrics front. That is now changing with the introduction of another option from LumenVox. Learning about LumenVox LumenVox’s offering has…
With the acquisition of Broadsoft, Cisco is getting a true cloud contact center platform. The company announced the rebranding at Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, ushering in the Cisco Customer Journey Experience. Broadsoft’s contact center product — now known as the Cisco Customer Journey Platform — is the first to adopt this new name. Customer…
[sayit]Cloud has been on many minds when it comes to contact centers. Cisco has its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) platform, which is a part of its on-premises software to run in partner data centers and function as if it were a cloud. Many have considered this more of a haze than a cloud. But it…
For those who have not heard, Cisco Systems is shifting its licensing strategies. Gone — well, almost gone — are the days of PAK keys and questions on when to use it or not. The company has moved to a new licensing model, referred to as smart licensing. I say almost gone because not every…
Cisco Systems flagship contact center, Unified Contact Center Enterprise or UCCE, has long been heralded as one of the best in its class for resiliency and redundancy. The system has been fully fault tolerant with the capability of being geographically dispersed between two data centers. Well, for the most part that is, because there has…
CDW has long been associated with IT infrastructure and hardware; however, the professional services provided by CDW are not widely exposed. I’m the technical architect for our Professional Services on the Contact Center side, and after having several conversations with companies at Cisco Live, I thought it might be prudent to write this blog to…
Virtualization is here and more applications are becoming virtualized in the Cisco contact center space. This is a bold new world for Cisco as it leaves the hardware/IOS arena and moves to virtual appliance models. There are two specific devices that we are going to talk about here and what this means for customers. First,…
Contact centers are morphing into customer care centers — the heartbeat for many organizations’ interactions with customers or constituents. “Customer care” means different things to different companies. But typically, a customer care center lets people communicate with an organization by phone, email, or web-based chat and instant messaging. A looming question for many companies in…
Today, every company needs some sort of customer engagement — whether they know it or not. Customer engagement has metamorphosed to include not only external customers but internal customers as well. There are many options out there for companies to choose from, but which is the best for you? This post focuses on Cisco products…
Cisco recently released its 11.0 software platform for both Enterprise and Express. They’ve added more features and functionality, reduced some complexities and overall delivered a newer product. But is this release truly revolutionary? Let’s begin by breaking down the Enterprise features added to the platform. Cisco changed the operating system to Windows Server 2012R2 and…
Last quarter, we looked at the shift from multichannel to omnichannel, as well as the rich content that can be integrated into a Cisco Enterprise Contact Center. Cisco has a rich partner ecosystem which enables their software to do some extraordinary things, and that laid the foundation for moving them into this omnichannel world and…
Contact centers are now increasingly becoming more complex and complicated. With various avenues and roadways to communicate, we must adapt and conform to meet customer expectations. Multichannel is so two years ago; now it’s omnichannel, which is essentially multichannel, but with one point of aggregation and a system framework. At the heart of it all…
