OMNINGAGE Minimises Time & Maximises Cloud ROI

How OMNINGAGE will minimise your time to value and maximize your cloud ROI

Beginnings

As my colleague and friend, Daniel Solomon, said in his recent article, we started Omningage in May 2020.

Organizations had been considering migrating to the cloud before we founded the company, but the pandemic accelerated this trend massively.

He mentioned how we set up our development centre in Lahore, Pakistan, using a “serverless” model which cut costs and afforded great flexibility.

Less than a year later, our first customer started using our product, and five months after that, our second customer also went live.

Growing pains

While we anticipated the developing trend, we did not anticipate just how fast demand for cloud contact centres would grow.

As we discussed the growth in demand with our partners, “We realized there weren’t many AWS partners who are focused on contact centre” – said Daniel Solomon, Managing Director of Omningage.

Migrating contact centres has proven to be a very complex task. Daniel adds: “We need to understand the “as is” versus the future and link them together”.

Dimension Data asked Omningage to help them migrate one of their large international customers to Amazon Connect in a deal worth more than half a million pounds. The deal was unusually complex, involving contact centre workloads in nine different countries being migrated from Avaya to Amazon Connect in four of AWS’s regions.

Evolution

We decided to remodel our organizational architecture to respond to these demands, dividing the company into three divisions.

The development of our contact centre desktops and reporting solutions are handled by our “Omni-Connect” and “Omni-IQ” divisions.

Professional services for deployment are provided by our “Omni-Serve” division. It provides a wide range of services, including Amazon Connect solution design, installation and training, the automation and integration of IVR and CTI systems, the design and deployment of APIs, bots and bespoke software, and the provision of data link and migration services.

To address partners’ more immediate needs, we established our “Omni-Care” division to provide support services for Amazon Connect as well as for Omni-Connect products, managed services to run the customers’ cloud-based contact centres where applicable and integration support.

Challenges

Building Omni-Serve was not without its challenges, the largest was staffing.

Since Omni-Serve was a customer facing division, we needed someone with extensive technical knowledge, leadership skills, steady nerves and experience handling customers and partners.

After a long search, we appointed Razzaq Butt as our Director of Professional Services. Not only does he have extensive experience of building and running professional services teams, but I also had the opportunity to work with him myself back in 2004 when I had freshly graduated from university and joined his team as a “rookie’ engineer.

For reasons beyond “Mr. Razzaq’s” control, the project had collapsed and we all worked together very hard to save it. We learned many valuable lessons from that project, and with that personal experience, I was sure that “Mr. Razzaq” was the right person for the job.

Staffing the team was also a challenge, since we needed people with experience of the legacy contact centre platforms we would be migrating customers’ workloads from, as well as a sound knowledge of AWS and Amazon Connect.

Luckily for us, a large Genesys reseller had closed their offices in Lahore in the not-too-distant past. Since analytics and contact centres go together like fish and chips, we found people with experience of Avaya, Genesys and Cisco contact centres to join our team.

What’s next?

The demand for Amazon Connect doesn’t show any signs of slowing down in the near future, so we expect the demand for professional services will increase accordingly.

We aim to develop the team to deliver enterprise level managed service capabilities for our partners to enhance and maintain their reputation with our customers.

The team’s capabilities will also be increased to design and deliver solutions including additional AWS compute, storage and networking services.

The wrap up

The business and financial imperatives for migrating your contact centre to the cloud need no further discussion.

As with many ideas, the devil is in the details.

Our Omni-Serve team will lead you through those details to get your solution up and running in record time, so realizing your Return on Investment with the minimum “time to value”.