Cisco's Achilees heel

I have meaning to write about this for sometime now, but have been caught up in my day job.

After I had blogged about Nortel winning the Telmex deal, one of my regular visitors to this blog (whom I respect a lot for his insightful thoughts) was telling me that Cisco tried hard to get this account, but failed eventually because of the huge overhead that came with their proposed solution. The many servers approach (Call manager, Hosted Unified contact Center) is just one of the reasons killing Cisco in this space.

Cisco's hosted solutions have quite a few chinks in their armour. Most hosted services look at browser based agent desktops and though CAD ( Cisco Agent Desktop) is available in a browser based edition, there are a few shortcomings. It does not have support for call control, very limited integration touch points with external applications, agent state is not available, supervisory monitoring is not available and outbound ( Dialer) is not supported. It can easily be argued that these can be built using Cisco's CTIOS Toolkit, but the fact remains that the existing out of the Box CAD don't have the needed features. Add to this the fact that Supervisor Desktop (CSD) is not web based ( it's a thick client) and CAD cannot work with the traditional TDM ACDs, it pretty much closes a lot of doors for Cisco.

Now as I mentioned earlier, there is a whole lot of overhead cost that comes with this. There is no inhouse Voice Recording product and this feature has to bought from a certified third party. SQL Server licensing is high. IPCC Hosted requires 3 machines with processor licenses, 6 machines with Server and client licenses and Informix license is further needed for a CVP reporting server. Add to this, the huge number of servers that needs to be managed.

These will make any CIO nervous and that is what is happening. Cisco's hosted solution is little too complex and they need to build a single server solution ( say IPCC Hosted Express?) if they are going to have any kind of an impact. One thing is for sure. Any company which could help Cisco in this domain is a sure target for acquisition :) ( Will Webex fit this bill?)