VoIP termination may just about become legal in India

There was a very important announcement from TRAI where they are abolishing ADC ( Access Deficit charge) from April 1st. This was one of the main reasons why the existing Telecom providers were saying that Enterprises/Users should not terminate VoIP calls on PSTN ( because they were loosing out on this revenue).

Now with this being abolished, it could pave way for VoIP termination to become legal. There was a unique problem where we were architecting an Outbound call center over IP for a BPO in India and we had to architect it such a way that termination of each of the outbound calls had to happen in the same STD region ( i.e have a Media/Voice Gateway) in each of the locations. We could not have agents sitting in Chennai making calls out of Mumbai VG to customers in Chennai. The law as of today states that the Chennai agents HAVE to call the Chennai customers through the local gateways.

This news might be a blessing since cost of having Media Gateways in each location is phenomenol and rules out a centralized architecture. Maybe this abolition of ADC might help us architect solutions better. Most of the times, things are possible using Technology but it is the process/business needs that are the impediments 🙂

Oracle Entering Contact Center space?

I saw an article in Economic Times which talked about Oracle having come up with a product for the contact center. Their premise is that the contact center suite of products is complicated ( Tell me about it!!) and they are out to simplify that ( Where have I heard that before?)

They are going after Telcos/Big Enterprises/BPOs ( Surprise, surprise)

Before I pass judgements, let me see whether I can get more dope on this and evaluate whether they even make sense.