As a software company, we specialise in running the best possible software platform for our businesses – every minute spent worrying about low-level hardware or network infrastructure takes that time away from our core business. In this article, QContact explains why we don’t run our own datacentres and why we let experts deal with our non-core business needs.

By using Microsoft Azure to host our platform, we benefit from the hundreds of thousands of employees Microsoft employs, and the billions of dollars they invest in their platform every year, to run a more reliable and more scalable solution than we could build in house.

When you are evaluating different contact centre solutions, many businesses may be tempted to build a solution in house with various vendors or open-source projects. At first it may seem like a great solution – fully control your destiny and potentially even appears a cheaper proposition.

However time and time again, we see the same issues – businesses sacrifice functionality as they struggle to build certain aspects of the platform, the cost savings are soon outweighed by the ever increasing pricing of software developers, or worse – key people leave the business and you’re left with a system no-one knows how to maintain or modify.

By choosing a SaaS platform such as QContact, you not only benefit from a fully maintained, fully supported and customisable solution, you also constantly gain new additional functionality – over 1000 new features and new functionality was added to our platform over the past 18 months. Further, we don’t charge setup fees – meaning your entire solution is a Op-Ex expense with no Capex costs.

Why Microsoft Azure?

We’re often asked why we chose Microsoft Azure over another cloud platform. For such a critical part of our infrastructure, what were the key factors that went into that decision?

Firstly – global presence – Azure has presence in 75 regions around the world with more coming online this year. Compare that to AWS with just 21 regions, Google Cloud with 29 regions and Oracle with 36 – Microsoft has more regions than nearly all the competition put together. The more regions, the closer their datacentres are to the end-user, the better the voice quality and user experience.

Next we look at whether the cloud provider is going to be in the business long-term. We’re confident to place AWS and Azure in this grouping, but Google has a history of discontinuing services and products, and Oracle may not continue to plough billions into their cloud division if they don’t win significant business over the coming years.

Thirdly we must consider is the vendor a competitor to our customers – if you are an online marketplace do you really want to use a product hosted in your competitor’s datacentre? This certainly discounts AWS.

Finally, as an interconnected platform we have to consider what our customers are using, and where it’s best to place our platform. The majority of our customer base uses Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, so it makes sense for our integrations with these platforms be based in the same datacentres they run from. And for customers who already have Direct Connects into Azure, they can utilise these same links to ensure the best possible Quality of Service.

So if your business is looking to make an upgrade to your communication or CRM platform, you should speak to us today to see how we can help provide you with a scalable and reliable solution. With all your calls, texts, e-mails, social media, WhatsApp, reviews and more in a single unified interface with a single pane of glass view of your entire business communication needs.