When 1Stream began their business activity they went for on premises model, as this was the available and predominant model chosen by technology companies. However, in the last decade, this reality has been changing at an increased speed. In the early 2000s, with the internet revolution it became possible to offer IT business services on a pay-per-use basis and cloud-based architecture, offering more flexibility and technological innovations.

1Stream decided to open this trail in South Africa. In their case, they took the leap to the cloud for a good number of reasons. On a global perspective, with the Seacom cable initiatives, South Africa was leveraged with proper worldwide connectivity (broadband) while being in an excellent timezone to serve Europe in a Managed Services model. South Africa has a great community of English-speaking agents eager to work in contact centre environments. Also, after a recession period, customers were turning away from high upfront investments required to buy licensing, and the demand for pay as you grow business models was rising. With an expanding customer base, 1Stream needed to scale up while ensuring information confidentiality and security. Their customers were in a single monolithic environment and this reality could not properly scale. Something needed to change.

1Stream needed to find a solution that could help them make the transition from on premises to cloud hosted solution in way an agile way and that allowed them to:

• Get financial flexibility in order to offer more competitive business solutions;
• Move away from systems with large licensing and equipment cost;
• Increase agility and scalability on technological side;
• Improve data management and guarantee its security.

1Stream adopted OneContact CC, a platform capable of offering full contact management across voice, video, chat, e-mail and social networks. They rely on Nubitalk, which is Collab’s cloud, supported by Microsoft Azure. Its architecture addresses the need for a more flexible environment and allows the deployment of new business models in the contact centre like hosted contact centre and co-sourcing, reducing total cost of ownership when compared to legacy applications. OneContact is omnichannel and 100% multi-tenant at its core, with agent and supervisor capabilities completely web-based.

with the implemented solution 1Stream gained:

• 35% savings vs on premises model;
• Financial flexibility which allowed them to quickly offer PoCs and agility to deploy them within a month;
• Reduced infrastructure and operational cost;
• Reduced business complexity management;
• Agility to scale depending on business needs;
• Pay per use model to meet the demands of each specific business;
• Ability to support expansion strategies into other countries without incurring additional equipment costs;
• Security enhancements;
• Disaster recover capabilities due to redundancy and data backup
• Growth: they are the leading provider of cloud based contact centre technology in Southern Africa.