Enterprise password management is a much talked-about issue today, what with the spate of high-profile enterprise security breaches, thus attention is now on ways to prevent identity thefts. Industry insider Beth Schultz has recently written an article on password management systems, citing the fact that Gartner data shows that password-related queries “account for approximately 30 percent of total call volume for multipurpose help desks.”

Naturally, people forget their passwords all the time, especially when working under company policies to keep changing them. That’s a lot of time spent on frustratingly routine problems. Schultz notes that Gartner also found the amount of calls about forgotten passwords drops about 70 percent when companies use password-management tools.

These tools can provide self-service reset capability, for one thing, and as Schultz says, with help desk- related costs ranging from $3 to $18 per request, you can see the benefit of such enterprise password management tools that can also “streamline the change process by synchronizing access across multiple systems, and help companies strengthen and enforce password policies.”


Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida is one place Schultz says enterprise password management can be used to an advantage. "We needed a tool with enough intelligence so that when we changed an administrative password on a server or system it would scour the network for dependent services and update their credentials. Otherwise those services stop working, and that's really no fun," she quotes Brendan Hourihan, director of network and desktop support services at Flagler, as saying.

Read more here.

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The Hispanic population in the United States is growing rapidly, which is an issue for call center outsourcing. Specifically, is your company doing everything it can to adequately serve your Hispanic customers?

Whatever your perception of the Hispanic population, according to a call center outsourcing study written in the mid-2000s titled “Service, Por Favor: Ten Reasons to Better Serve and Woo the Booming Hispanic Market,” the Hispanic market segment boasts some $580 billion in spending power, which at the time was expected to nearly double to $925 billion by 2007, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth.


That’s probably not the sort of economic growth you want to be ignoring, especially in your call centers. The good news is that call center outsourcing can help.

The study zeroes in on nearshore outsourcing is a way to serve U.S. Hispanics: While it’s true that up to now some companies haven’t provided the same Spanish customer support and marketing as they do for Anglophones, either because of the expenses associated or because they haven’t sought a more Hispanic market, there are increasingly attractive options for providing Spanish support, such as nearshore outsourcing.

Read more here.

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It’s possible to simplify call center routing with cloud switching, as officials of LiveVox said on a recent blog entry.

LiveVox is the company responsible for Private VoIP Cloud, cloud-based switching, which is intended to help move switching and routing from the premise fully into the network. The offering lets contact centers execute multi-site call routing “without site-based switching or expensive and limited intelligent networking hardware.”

And don’t just assume “oh yeah, sure sure, simplification, got it, no problem.” If you’ve never been up close and personal with one, friends, a multi-site contact center management and call routing is “phenomenally complex,” as they say, with complexity driven by such factors as “existing network topologies, integration between disparate hardware and site-premised switching requirements.”

The detrimental effect these issues have is to limit a contact center’s ability to really get everything out of a perfectly good multi-site, multi-country, and home-agent configuration. While globalization does create “opportunities for efficiencies and improved workflows,” as LiveVox officials say, traditional technology will only get you so close to them because of what the blogger refers to as “the difficulty of making incremental improvements to existing architecture.”

Read more here.

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An article in the industry journal Datacenter Dynamics recently discussed data center infrastructure management provider iTRACS’s new strategy for its Converged Physical Infrastructure Management software suite and how that applies to optimizing data center power use.

Company officials focused on their new PowerEye methodology, calling it a “best-practices strategy” for reducing energy consumption – both for IT and facilities infrastructure. It gives users a visualization of both IT and core infrastructure assets, identifies energy-saving opportunities and creates a plan of action to pursue them.

They said the proper strategy has “four basic steps: visualize, analyze, manage and optimize.” Visualization is done via CPIM's capabilities, and the way company officials explain it, the software analyzes data, measures PUE or DCiE throughout the electrical infrastructure and “finds areas where power is lost.”

iTRACS president and CEO Elizabeth Given said that by using the product, “IT and facilities managers can collaboratively manage power circuits through the entire physical infrastructure as a holistic power chain.”

Read more here.