Making the decision: Hosted vs. onsite

When it comes down to it, the underlying reasons to go with a hosted or an onsite deployment are critical. Both solutions have pronounced benefits and real drawbacks. The answer depends on many factors, some of which will be unique to your business. However there is great information online on the factors that should drive your decision.

I recently came across an outstanding article by Keith Dawson in NewsFactor, who works in the contact center industry. After doing a lot of evaluating, he came to this conclusion:

Empirically, we have more than 20 years of evidence that shows that premise based technologies (by themselves) manifestly do not solve these structural endemic problems. It may be the case that removing technology management from the contact center’s daily experience provides the window of opportunity to actually deal with those business processes. After all, creating workflows and managing people are what centers are genuinely good at. An argument can be made that hosting may be the next great transformative leap that allows contact centers to really engage with their employees and customers and leave handling the switch or the software to someone else.

However, hosting is not for everyone. Hosting is great for smaller deployments:

Deploying hosted technology is not a binary, all or nothing choice. With certain technologies you can start small and gradually move upscale, depending on your needs. Of course, if you don’t know how large you might need to grow, you may end up on the wrong side of the cost equation when you eventually do expand capacity.

The greatest advantage of hosting is often cost. In our case we can host your software for far less than most internal IT departments. Here’s what Keith noted:

Why are you considering off-premising in the first place? Is it because you want to try something you’re not currently using? Or because you need to grow/ shrink/cut costs? The key to making this decision successful is knowing whether you are looking at hosting/ leasing as a transition, or as a permanent shift in how you use technology.

The bottom line is that your organization needs to do cost/benefit before deciding on hosting applications. If you decide that hosting is right for your firm, we’d love to provide the service!