Notes on virtual switching and hosted switching

Are Skype type services virtual or hosted - or both? They are probably both but it depends what the context is. In the S2C (service provider to customer) context it could be interpreted as both. If Skype served the service providers in a S2S (service provider to service provider) scenario, then hosted would take a new meaning altogether.

The reason I write about this is because people use virtual and hosted interchangeably and I get confused. The hosted switching – if the context is S2S - would be enabled through platforms such as Broadsoft and Sylantro whereby they enable wholesale hosted PBX services i.e. a wholesaler such as NGT hosting the platform and partitioning it for other service providers to offer retail services to their enterprise customers.

In the call center world there is an even higher level of confusion for me when they use ‘virtual call center’ and ‘hosted call center’ terms interchangeably. A service provider in S2C scenario can offer virtual call center in absence of hosted call center but not other way around.

In order to do hosted call centre we have to have a virtual platform because that is what hosted call centre is all about. The customer’s agents are going to be at all sorts of different places and the service provider technology is centralised somewhere in the network cloud. It is necessary for hosted to be virtual but at the same time it has to be multi-tenant with tenant self administration or else you can’t have hosted solution. Maybe you can have dedicated hosted but you can’t have shared platform hosted. So, again, a service provider can offer virtual call center service in absence of hosted call center but not the other way around.

In S2S hosted call center business there are some system integrators that are selling to telcos, who in turn are selling to enterprises. But unlike in VoIP, this trend of private label hosted call center thing has not caught on yet. Cosmocom has been exploring this model for a long time now. The company has two customers in Asia, one of them an incumbent telco and the other a system integrator. These two companies are both offering S2S hosted contact center solutions to other providers on a wholesale number-of-seats basis letting the providers brand the services in their own way.

So just a little attempt to clear up my own confusion!