The Benefits of On-Demand Services

Have you ever thought of running your own power plant?

We assume not because of the sheer enormity of the operating costs. Instead, you are buying your electricity on a pay-as-you-go model. What is common practice for electricity will soon apply to and transform the IT industry.

IT Industry Challenges

Cost reduction and innovation challenge every industry. Despite these seemingly contradictory goals, the development of the following IT sourcing concepts can address both:

• Application Service Providing (ASP)
• Facility Management
• Hosted Services
• Managed Services
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

These concepts all represent a decoupling of the infrastructure from the services it provides to make them available On-Demand.

While they offer side benefits such as cost savings, increased productivity and the ability to focus on your core competencies, On-Demand Services also represent an innovative, future-oriented and competitive IT development. The transition from classical to commoditized IT infrastructure management has become possible through technical standardization and virtualized processes.

The Paradigm Shift to Outsourced IT

In general, the commoditization of IT changes industry requirements and opens new opportunities. The paradigm shift lets strategic IT management focus on real service provision instead of just keeping the infrastructure up and running.

Specifically, the advantages of outsourced IT services include:

• The conversion of fixed costs into variable costs, increasing the transparency of resource consumption and cost allocation.
• Increased flexibility and scalability for improved capacity management for extreme usage peaks or extraordinary growth.
• Significant cost savings through economies of scale, both for service providers and their customers.
• Definition and monitoring of services both on application and product levels.
• An ongoing technology refresh.
• Low cost of entry and a short setup time.

Challenges and opportunities for the telecommunications market

Due to the outstanding advantages of these sourcing models, trends in the IT industry will also impact the telecommunications market.

Since Voice over IP communications are deployed in all major segments of the IT and telecommunications industries, the groundwork has been laid for an On-Demand Services approach.

But what does that mean for the contact center market?

In contact centers, where communications serves as the sole business driver, it is critical to deliver quality and cost-effective services to stand out from the competition.

Call recording and quality monitoring are becoming more and more a major requirement to fill the knowledge gap of “what is really going on.” Monitoring crucial business processes will change agent communications from a phantom to a valuable data resource.

Staying ahead of today's rapidly changing technologies can distract your focus from core competencies. Moreover, building a sophisticated voice recording and quality monitoring solution means immense investments of time and money in resources and manpower, especially in large contact centers. 

Conclusion

With an on-demand approach, service providers and customers benefit from significant cost savings due to low entry costs, a short setup time and an ongoing technological refresh. In large contact centers, where capacity management must handle extreme usage peaks or extraordinary growth, ODS are the answer.

With an on-demand service approach, any business type or size can benefit from advanced recording, workforce optimization and speech analytics without separate monolithic systems but with all the advantages of outsourced IT.