Charles Miller, CTO of Support Services Group (S2G) and Asterisk guru has more than 16 years of contact center experience. Prior to joining Support Services Group (S2G), he spent the last 6 years as CTO of a contact center company called UpSource Inc. Before UpSource Inc., he spent 10 years working for telephony companies Verizon and Bell Atlantic managing technology and operations for over 30 contact centers located in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, and the Philippines. Mr. Miller started his career at Gateway as a Technical Support Professional in the late 1990s. He is co-inventor of a USA patent for a security apparatus, method, and computer program for contact centers and currently holds certification as a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Mr. Miller holds a BA in Business Administration and a BS in Computer Information Systems from Saint Leo University; and MS in Information Systems specializing in Information Systems Security from Northwestern University. Mr. Miller joined S2G in January 2015.
Could you summarize for our readers your profile and your role in the Asterisk community?
Prior to my role as Chief technology officer (CTO) at Support Services Group (S2G), Asterisk was a well-known platform, but was generally never considered a viable platform for medium to large contact centers. Most of my career in the contact center industry involved leveraging established enterprise telephony platforms like Avaya. Therefore, my involvement with the Asterisk community in the past has been rather limited.
However, in the past year Asterisk has now become a critical piece of S2G's business success. As CTO at S2G, I had the privilege of leading the integration of a recently acquired contact center company. S2G was running a rather simplified deployment of Asterisk while the other company was running the more complex Avaya Aura platform. After reviewing both platforms against the company's long term strategy, the decision was made to move forward with Asterisk as S2G's enterprise platform. While the Avaya platform was very capable with a well-established support network, Asterisk was able to provide the majority of what we required at a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
What gaps we identified were easily filled by working with the Asterisk community and augmenting Asterisk with complementary software like QueueMetrics and OrecX.
Visit http://loway.ch/asterisk-callcenter-interviews.jsp?uid=interview-20160204-charles_miller to read more.