Cloud services company Interactive Intelligence has launched its customer engagement cloud service for businesses in South Africa. In the final leg of a launch tour across the country, its PureCloud Engage architecture was unveiled in Johannesburg yesterday.

Interactive Intelligence says PureCloud Engage was built with the most stringent security requirements in mind.

Andre le Roux Managing Director, Africa Region at Interactive Intelligence says the solution addresses common contact centre issues such as high costs, lack of scalability, and difficulty managing geographically dispersed remote sites.

"Local contact centres increasingly need to roll out faster, scale up or down for campaigns without unnecessary expense, and focus their resources and budget more on staff and customer experience rather than infrastructure," said le Roux.

Security warning

The security aspect of any cloud solution cannot be overstated according to World Wide Worx, Managing Director, Arthur Goldstuck who offered an analyst's perspective on PureCloud Engage during the launch.

"While cloud solutions have matured quickly, many organisations are still concerned about security," Goldstuck remarked.

The World Wide Worx executive says organisations need to evaluate their cloud options, assess a vendor's security certifications, access management controls, encryption, and intrusion testing protocols.

PureCloud Engage is built as a set of stateless, independently load-balanced microservices running atop the scalable Amazon Web Services Cloud. The architecture was designed to achieve higher levels of reliability, security and scalability according to Interactive Intelligence.

Wider African rollout

Deon Scheepers, Manager of Sales and Operations, Africa Region at Interactive Intelligence described the prospects of their new offering to ITWeb Africa.

"We literally started deploying this in Africa from January this year and there is growing interest. The advantage we have is that this is hosted in the cloud and we link to the data centre in Ireland. It makes no difference whether we are linking from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya or Congo because they all have access to the same data centres, service and functionality. Provided you've got internet connection to Amazon Web Services in Ireland you've got full access and it is as simple as that. We've got partners and resellers in several countries including Kenya and Nigeria, which we are now busy training and educating and we expect to have similar launches with partners in those regions as well in the next two to three months."

Scheepers says MTN is one of their strategic sales partners and the mobile operator will be reselling PureCloud in the near future.

"MTN will be reselling PureCloud and they can get the license fees and commissions - and of course they get revenue. They make revenue on the connectivity because they can connect and provide telecommunications services onto the PSTN for telephony voice and also provide internet connectivity for the customer into Amazon... in addition to the money they can make from our licences. They have access to our hosted solution as well as PureCloud Engage which we will be reselling but all of the system will still be based in Ireland. We are also looking for other partners, including more telcos in order to take this solution to market both from a hoisted on-premise point of view, as well as from a PureCloud point of view."

PureCloud Engage is currently offered directly through the Interactive Intelligence salesforce as well as through the company's 400-strong global partner channel.