DCN November 2016 | Page 10

industry news CONTACT CENTRE PROFESSIONALS MISSING KEY CLOUD OPPORTUNITIES, SUGGESTS NEW RESEARCH New research conducted by Aspect Software has found that while the majority of contact centres are using cloud to some extent, adoption for many is relatively superficial. According to Aspect, while the data shows the industry going in the right direction, the truly transformative benefits of the delivery model for customer engagement and agent productivity will only be unlocked when contact centres migrate more of their operations to the cloud. Aspect surveyed 100 senior contact centre professionals in the UK to better understand their priorities for their centres over the coming year and their uptake of, and appetite for, cloud based services. It found that roughly eight in 10 (78 per cent) are using cloud to some extent, with the channel most likely to have been migrated being email, in 60 per cent of cases, and voice (54 per cent). However, cloud adoption in other channels remains low; just 23 per cent have migrated SMS to cloud, 13 per cent have deployed cloud based web chat, and only 27 per cent manage their mobile Apps in the cloud. Launch of new suite of dedicated insurance products for the data centre sector Insurance broker Ernest R Shaw has teamed up with DCA Trade Association and technical cleaning and data centre healthcare business 8 Solutions to launch a dedicated insurance proposition specifically designed for the data centre sector. The launch follows a 12 month consultation between Ernest R Shaw, 8 Solutions, and the Data Centre Alliance (DCA). The task was to identify and agree a best practice framework to underpin this new offering. Businesses that adopt and meet this best practice in the future could then qualify for a lower insurance premium, underwritten by Allianz Insurance, one of the largest insurers in the UK and part of the Allianz SE Group. Steve Hone, CEO of the DCA Trade Association, commented, ‘Recognising and rewarding data centres who demonstrate best practice is at the heart of this initiative. Data centres who have been independently audited under the DCA certification scheme and or end users who choose to host in data centres which have achieved this accreditation can now all benefit from this new range of insurance products and services which have been tailor made to support the data centre sector and its users.’ 10 IN BRIEF A new white paper on data centre optimisation from Chatsworth Products (CPI) warns that a revolution currently taking place in the data centre environment requires data centre managers to urgently rethink their strategies. The white paper, titled, ‘Data Centre Optimisation: A Guide to Creating Better Efficiency and Improving Rack Heat Density in Air Cooled Facilities’ explores ways that data centres can operate more efficiently and cost effectively and provides guidance on a best practice approach for the modern data centre. Agilitas has been awarded accreditation from Lenovo to be its UK and Republic of Ireland strategic part sales distributor partner for DCG. At the moment, Lenovo enterprise customers, which include IT resellers, managed service providers and end user businesses, are required to go through IBM part sales in Amsterdam to get hold of official server and storage parts. The accreditation will see Agilitas take on this role, providing a local UK presence that will see the company ensure a quicker and more effective UK centric service. Cloudian has announced the opening of a new EMEA demonstration facility in Amsterdam. Located in the thriving Zuid-Oost region of central Amsterdam, the centre will be hosted within Switch Datacenters’ state-ofthe-art facility and will enable Cloudian to provide proofof-concept demonstrations locally. Fuelled by UK and EU customer demand for its 100 per cent native S3 object storage solutions, the launch of the new EU demonstration centre marks an important milestone in Cloudian’s EMEA expansion. It follows on the heels of Cloudian’s recent additions to its EMEA team across Netherlands, Germany and the UK. XPATJobs has launched its new online IT specific jobs board which allows users to search for, and place, new jobs and find the skilled professionals they need no matter where in the world they are based, all via a single portal. findajobinit. com is a one-stop-shop that links skilled professionals in the technology sector with IT organisations across the world. Supported by the company’s XPATJobs. com site, which sees 100,000 jobs posted each day, findajobinit.com will provide employers and hiring managers with access to a network of more than one million registered jobseekers across 150 countries.