CaaS Week in Review

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

Welcome to the end of the first week of 2014: we hope it has treated you well! While it’s been a bit of a disjointed week, nevertheless it has been an eventful one in the communications-as-a-service industry. Top stories for the week are summarized below.

Research firm Frost & Sullivan, as part of their Movers & Shakers series, recently did a video interview with Interactive Intelligence CEO Dr. Don Brown (News - Alert).  The video provides Brown’s views on the impact the cloud is having on transforming the customer interactions market, including his opinion that, “If you are not bold you are obsolete.”  Interestingly, this is good advice regardless of the business your company competes in.  TMCnet spoke with others at Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) for clues to what CaaS will bring in 2014.

In this age of cloud, today’s leading solution providers are helping customers transform the customer experience, according to Interactive Intelligence’s Jason Alley, writing for TMCnet. However, those considering moving their contact center to the cloud should know there is an important distinction between cloud providers… and cloud solution providers. It’s important to understand the differences.

Topseos.com, a provider of search marketing ratings, has considered Call Tracking Metrics as the best call tracking service in the month of December, 2013. An independent research team at topseos.com has done a test of search engine marketing software providers to decide which software providers produce the best call tracking services.  This research team at topseos.com conducted a veracious examination of the internet marketing services in order to remain abreast of the latest developments of performing call tracking consultants.

Many employees are working on or are on-call during the holidays. Emergency crews are braving the cold to get power back on in the United States and Canada after a nasty ice storm. Police, firefighters, EMS crews and health-care providers are working as well. Emergencies never stop. Interestingly, IT pros were on call this holiday season, too. Much of the work is expected to relate to remote network access problems and other glitches, according to a report from Network Computing based on an Ipswitch (News - Alert) survey.

Online telemedicine solutions providers such as SecondOpinions.com have begun to transform health care in the U.S., making obtaining information easier.  Patients upload their radiology images (MRI, CT etc) to a HIPAA regulated, secure, confidential platform. This means they can review a report in the privacy from anywhere in near real-time.  The service also features doctors, in virtually every medical specialty, who are in essence “on-call” to provide consultations via phone or video chat, i.e., to provide a second option.

That’s all for this week in communications-as-a-service (Caas). Happy New Year, and see you again next week!