Honestly, AWS's solution isn't bad. Their contact-center experience is actually pretty nice -- and honestly a lot better UX than what Avaya has been providing out of the box lately. That being said, like with any cloud solution you need to be very careful how you engineer it. Otherwise, it is just like when we started throwing the phone system on an IP network without understanding what was going on.
Engineering the right solution is key. Doing it the right way costs money, and if you do it the right way, you won't save anything going to the cloud.
How critical is it that your call-center is up? If you want to protect yourself from connectivity issues, you really need to get an MPLS circuit direct to AWS's data centers. The MPLS should have uptime guarantees to cover what your expectation is for service. Need more than 3 nine's of uptime? Maybe you should get two MPLS circuits so you can rotate them during planned outages from your carrier.
You should also consider locating your assets in multiple availability zones in AWS. This will increase the cost, but will protect you from issues involving a particular data-center.
I can't speak to the encrypted voicemails. But as far as integration, you should be able to simulate that.
The bigger question is
why the move? If there is a particular business reason to drive that direction other than "We need to move the cloud! Everybody else is doing it!" than you should weigh that against what you currently have. I know in our case, we are very sensitive to downtime for our voice services, so it already becomes less of a priority. In our case, our org would much rather spend the million dollars we have in hand and own something rather than rent it for a million over 5 years. We are also very weary when we are approached simply on the cost benefits alone (when you peel that onion and look at a 5 year ROI, it usually isn't there when you take in account EVERYTHING including the network access, etc). BUT you usually tend to get faster upgrades and more features on these types of products.
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Nick Kwiatkowski
Director of Design and Engineering
Michigan State University
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-14-2019 04:28 PM
From: Jessica Persico
Subject: Amazon Connect Is Taking Over
Hey Folks,
Don't know if this is the correct community for this, but we just had an 'impartial' business partner come in and sell the business our own shoes [AWS Connect]. Has anyone had any experience with AWS? I am scrambling to try and put together a document enumerating potential pitfalls of migrating to this system.
1. no full systems integration = no extension to extension dialing or voicemail integration
2. voice recordings not encrypted.
Helphelphelp
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Jessica P
Contact Center Engineer
New York
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