In the age of digital transformation, there are numerous paths to the future for growing brands.
Many companies continue to make their investments on-premises, relying on the security and control they feel they have with physical systems. Other organisations see the immense value and scalability of cloud and have begun to move their companies towards that environment. Sometimes, to truly have the best of both worlds, it’s essential to find a balance between new cloud solutions, and existing on-premises deployments.
Tollring, one of the market leaders in call analytics software, data visualisation, and business intelligence tools, believes that it is important to give channel partners, and their customers, the option of a hybrid deployment. It is a particularly attractive option to those not yet ready to fully transition to the cloud.
I met with Simon Whatley, Director of Sales Operations for Tollring, to discuss how hybrid solutions are delivering benefits to the channel and end-customers alike.
Developing a Hybrid Proposition
Tollring is a company that gives today’s businesses useful insights and greater control over their communication systems and the data within them. With Tollring’s technology, it is possible to record calls, detect toll fraud, and conduct in-depth analytics to understand and improve the entire customer experience journey.
Simon Whatley comments, “As the director of sales operations, I work on everything from onboarding to post-sale customer support. It’s all about the end-to-end experience.”
According to Simon, Tollring is focused on delivering a complete experience for all its customers. Although they’re a partner-focused business, they believe that a happy channel begins with happy end-users.
At the same time, the modern channel needs to offer their end-users solutions that not only deliver ROI now, but for the future. That’s where the hybrid environment comes in. With hybrid, companies can continue to enjoy the benefits of their on-premises systems while accessing all their data and analytics via the cloud.
What Does the Hybrid Environment Mean for Tollring?
Delivering a hybrid solution for customers means that Tollring can give companies that are wedded to their existing PBX systems all the benefits of cloud analytics, without asking them to sacrifice existing investments.
“There is significant demand for cloud, but that doesn’t mean that people want to ignore on-premises completely. In fact, the on-premises side of our business is still growing exceptionally well.”
“We want to ensure that our customers can have all the latest solutions that we develop, in any environment that they choose”
Simon explained that hybrid developments are a positive thing for the company. To begin with, they enable Tollring to focus on developing a single product in the cloud that works for both markets, enabling them to deliver the very best solutions. Then there’s huge benefit for the customer, particularly around ease of use and accessing a system that never goes out of date. Finally, the partner benefits from having a single system to train for and deploy.
“There are benefits for everyone, all the way through the channel.”
How Does the Cloud Product Differ from the On-Premises Solution?
The hybrid model enables Tollring to deliver the same experience to both on-premises and cloud phone system users. “Our cloud product is the same as the hybrid solution. It is multi-tenant and feels completely the same. The way that they access the system and the features available are identical.”
Simon noted the fact that Tollring’s experience with both markets puts them in a unique position. They have developed the iCall Suite cloud proposition from scratch building on the company’s vast on-premises experience to ensure it operates across both environments. “For me, to be able to have a user base where we can offer everything they need in any environment is great. I don’t know many businesses that offer such flexibility at this stage.”
The Road to Cloud Call Analytics
Simon explains that in the pure on-premises world, Tollring needs to capture and store everything locally. However, the hybrid environment changes that by allowing the company to capture locally, buffer locally, encrypt and then stream securely to the cloud. “There are no compliance and privacy issues to worry about. You’ve got the full encryption service to facilitate compliance, and there’s no database on-site to worry about.”
In addition, businesses don’t need to worry about the reliability and availability of their system. “With the cloud, we can see what’s going on in the system at all times. We can ensure that everything is up and running as it should be. Hybrid environments allow us to deliver a more comprehensive level of customer support,” he adds.
What’s more, Tollring supports everything from their own data centres. No matter where their customers are, they don’t have to worry about things like data sovereignty and security.
“Every Tollring customer, from the smallest businesses to our Tier 1 service providers, benefits from the highest levels of data security”
According to Simon, for partners selling on-premises systems Tollring’s hybrid solution is an obvious choice. “It’s a thrilling new product that is easy to manage on the back-end. More and more, partners want to shift into this hybrid environment because it makes life easier for them, delivers recurring revenue and gives them the flexibility to deliver what customers want. Furthermore, when their customer is ready to move to a cloud-based phone system, we’re still there with the insight they’ve come to depend upon.”
What’s Next?
Simon acknowledged that Tollring is continually evolving its hybrid-cloud proposition. “There is still a healthy on-premises market out there and we are happy to help the channel and their customers to get the most out of their existing investments, whilst helping them on their journey to the cloud. Our roadmap for the next few years is strong and to be able to offer all of that functionality to a wider customer base is fantastic for the channel.
“We want to make our best technology accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they’re on-premises, or on the cloud, and hybrid allows us to do that.”
