Cloud call center software solutions: Purecloud, Multi-instance and On-Premise
5 min
If your company is using Salesforce, you already understood the key benefits of cloud vs. on premise solutions. In call center software and unified communications, things tend to get a bit more tricky. Here is a quick overview of platform architectures. If your company is not bound to any specific requirements, we recommend starting the selection process by shortlisting vendors with PureCloud architecture.
Understanding different VoIP platform architectures
PureCloud:
Purecloud call center software was born in the cloud. These solutions use true multi tenant and geo-distributed architecture, it is fault tolerant by design and doesn't bind customers to a specific server or node. Vendors deploying call center technology or unified communications with this architecture have a huge advantage in their ability to innovate, since their platforms are substantially easier to maintain at scale. Although these platforms depend on the Internet for streaming voice and video services, if the customer sticks to good practices and implementation guidelines, it is easy to ensure enterprise grade quality and reliability. Another key aspect are
- These platforms have pre built integrations with popular cloud applications, enabling operations to easily streamline and automate business processes.
- They leverage new technologies like WebRTC to deliver innovative solutions with HD voice.
Pros: Fault tolerant, fast paced innovation, low latency architecture, disaster recovery, easy to manage for end users and admins.
Cons: Communication quality depends on internet connectivity.
Hosted Multi-instance:
Vendors deploying multi-instance call center software are trying to bring the benefits of the cloud to their customer base while maintaining their traditional telephony architecture. Although this might seem like a similar option at first, vendors using this architecture will struggle to innovate and will ultimately stall since they are running one instance of their application for each customer. This quickly becomes an operational nightmare. Customers will be most likely bound to one server with a “hot” backup, which has two very important setbacks:
a. If the data center where you are hosted has an outage, communications will go down.
b. If you have a multisite business that spreads across geographies, you will be bound to one datacenter, which can cause delays and quality issues in your communications due to latency.
PureCloud call center vendors will deploy low latency architectures that seamlessly connect your users to the nearest datacenter, ensuring high quality communications for every site.
Pros: Access to basic benefits of cloud communications, eliminates in house management.
Cons: Slow product innovation, limited disaster recovery, prone to latency issues, hard to manage.
On premise or Single Instance:
Legacy on premise Call Center software is powered by traditional IP PBX software like Asterisk, Elastic or even hardware solutions. These platforms run on servers within your office or remotely in a datacenter managed by IT departments or consultants. On premise call center software is rarely updated or upgraded, provides very limited management only available to specialists that are either certified or highly experienced in VoIP and are prone to outages caused by fire, storms or other types of hazards. These platforms provide very limited or no out of the box integration with third party business applications, making them an increasing pain for management that need to streamline and automate business processes.
Pros: Might be cheaper if no maintenance is required.
Cons: No innovation in services, limited integration with business applications, prone to outages, limited business mobility, high maintenance, highly complex system administration, no support for global operations.
