Thanks to MPLS, More Reason than Ever for Cloud Call Centers

A good white paper, "The Cost Efficiency of Cloud: How IP/MPLS Redefines the Economics of Contact Research in the Call Center," produced by LiveVox, does a good job discussing what it sees as "a significant trend in networking and telephony... set to radically alter the economics of call center research in favor of the buyer and lead to broader adoption of cloud contact tools in 2011."

Way to transport voice

These days carriers are actively selling IP/MPLS as a way to transport voice and data. That’s a switch -- even a couple of years ago, many were lukewarm in the best case to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). However if contact centers all use MPLS, it would make it easier to tie them at the same time in the cloud, clearly. Having to upgrade their IP-PBX used to be the standard excuse why this couldn’t be done, yet that’s not as a matter of fact the case anymore.

As the paper explains evidently, contact centers and telecom carriers are moving to IP infrastructure and embracing Multi-Layer Protocol Label Switching to transport voice and data. And since MPLS gives call centers a much more cost-efficient way to contact clients, launching calls via MPLS is less expensive than through the Public Switch Telephone Network and such as secure and reliable.

How it used to be -- site-based switching

Hey we understand how it used to be -- site-based switching, protocol conversion and application integration made the WAN requirement all kinds of hassle, there weren’t any real standards carriers and IP-PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) vendors all agreed on, and yeah, hybrid and custom VoIP network configurations are expensive, slow, complicated and did we say expensive? That too.

But now carrier adoption of IP-MPLS, when coupled with the emergence of SIP standards, makes enterprise-grade VoIP networks possible in the real world. And you can get secure and reliable VoIP networks deployed in the contact center without carrier/PBX provisioning or custom integration.